Monolingualism

By monolingual ideology, I am not just referring to the values around speaking one language at large, such as French or Napali, but also around speaking one of the different versions of a language.  As Anzaldua (1987) poignantly explicates, different versions of the Spanish language all over the world are hierarchized by "the purist and most Latinos" (p. 35) and some of them deemed "deficient" (p. 35).  The French language also has been localized or nativized and so diversified in those nations colonized by France.   It is impossible for those speakers of different kinds of language to share the same principle(s) about a language that happens to have simply only one designation. Indeed, nativized, hybridized, or localized versions of a language are categorized as "dialects" within one designation although linguistic differences among them cannot and should not be painted in such a broad brush. It seems to me that the categorization of "dialects" signifies deliberate differentiation from a standardized version of a language. Thus, by monolingualism, I am referring to an oppressive belief in the values of standardized English 

Laying out the genealogy of the monolingual ideology, Canagarajah (2013a) discusses what the monolingual paradigm is and entails.  The paradigm, called “The Herderian triad” (Canagarajah, 2013a, p. 20), was formed by the triangular relations among language, community, and place.  Language and community are thought to be rooted in one place.  Thus, language has been considered to belong in a certain community within a place and to be owned by people in the community or the place.  Simultaneously, this “Herderian triad” has, ironically, succeeded in detaching language from people and giving language an autonomous status without any context.  So much so that language becomes a system or a science, which is guarded by the people in the linguistic community and yet can be “acquired” by anyone.  

Thus, the “Herderian triad” has built up doors and drawn lines between languages, while in actuality we navigate in and out of languages.  This is especially so in the transnational and global age because languages are not containable since they constantly travel via human beings and so encounter other languages or other codes of the same language.   However, this triangular paradigm breeds and nurtures the orientation which normalizes and standardizes the use of a certain structure of language, presents it as the standard language, and determines what is ‘right” or “wrong” to fortify the community and the place in the triad.  Naturally, this orientation has become a “benchmark for language assessment and social stratification” (Canagarajah, 2013a, p. 11) and has constructed the monolingual ideology. 

“Monolingualism is an ideology of many violences [sic] at the micro- and macro-levels,” state Watson and Shapiro (2018) when they call for actions to combat the harms of linguistic hierarchies and linguistic injustice.  The monolingual ideology is “the project of racism” (Watson & Shapiro, 2018, para. 8).  Establishing monolingualism as the standard language ideology legitimizes the only kind of English, the standardized English, and further downplays other kinds of English.  Advocating for linguistic justice, Baker-Bell (2020) points out that a more subtle form of racism, valuing the standardized White English, is executed in education and excludes linguistically diverse groups whose languages are deemed as aberration.  She cites Lippi-Green’s (2012) posit that “language and accent have become an acceptable excuse to publicly turn away, to refuse to recognize the other or acknowledge their rights” (as cited  in Baker-Bell, 2020, p. 17). The ideology penalizes students who can’t speak nor write in the standardized English, and of course this penalization creates material consequences among race, because monolingualism eventually bestows paths to some forms of capital, such as education, on the speakers who have a command over the standardized English and deprive the speakers who have a command over a different English of that capital.

Monolingual ideology deters some students in community colleges from pursuing higher education due to their lack of exposure to the standardized English even though they hold developed literacy in their languages.  Implementation of accelerating learning in community colleges, as has been demonstrated in the California Acceleration Project, for sure eliminates the daunting and economically burdensome ladder of remedial courses.   Accelerating learning courses in community colleges especially help some students who struggle financially to pursue and expedite their education.  Accelerating learning programs in community colleges also help students practice academic writing and reading instead of drilling decontextualized writing skills (Malcom, 2021).   However, arguing for the need for a translingual approach in writing courses at community colleges, Malcolm (2021) points out that this trend of accelerating programs could be just as detrimental as the eliminated “remedial” courses if these programs stay focused on eradication of linguistic differences that multilinguals produce as errors through teaching -- or “imposing” -- the standardized English.   She also warns us that “the institutional history of these courses could contribute to a view of acceleration programs as vehicles to help students hide or eradicate language differences more efficiently” (p. 104).   When accelerating learning programs have proved successful, it is time to look at if these programs are perceived as efficient vehicles to implement the monolingual ideology. 

There is an argument that speakers of other Englishes and other languages should be able to switch language codes, so to speak, code-switching in certain rhetorical contexts.  According to this argument, code-switching is a survival skill for the people who orient themselves in other kinds of English and other languages at every single aspect of their lives.  Code-switching, a skill of shifting from one language code to another, is a big asset to survive and thrive in higher education, for sure.  However, given what happened to Prof. Henry Louis Gates Jr., then director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African-American Research at Harvard University, the ability to do code-switching does not necessarily serve Black people justice.  While Professor Gates attempted to open the door of his house since the door had been jammed while he was away, a white woman walking by called 911 for a possible burglary.  He was arrested for “disorderly conduct” (Coates, 2010, para 7). Code-switching cannot dismantle this linguistic injustice, and what is worse, could not save Black people’s lives.  Rather, code-switching only reinforces the linguistic hierarchy among different versions of English (Young & Martinez, 2011; Baker-Bell, 2020; Malcolm, 2021).  McCluney et al. discuss the cost of code-switching and point out that people who code-switch face a professional and personal dilemma.  Code-switching might make them “suppress their cultural identity” (McCluny et al., 2019, para. 23) while not code-switching might affect their careers.

Not only is monolingualism “the project of racism”, but also as the standard language ideology and English-only policy, it suppresses other people’s ways of knowing.  Bennett (2014) affirms that it is epistemicide when students are not allowed to use their languages.   Epistemicide is the term coined by the Portuguese sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos in “Reinventing Social Emancipation”, to describe one of the pernicious effects of globalization on developing countries, that is, killing others’ ways of knowing.  This effect, epistemicide, is happening within the so-called developed countries, too, by depriving students of their own languages in which they live, love, think, and cry. 

Forcing a particular cultural formulation of knowledge, such as introduction, body paragraphs, topic sentences, and so on, on ELLs who are most likely to have learned other formulations of knowledge is also a form of epistemicide.  My open letter to Amy Tan is a form of knowledge production, which is quite common in Japan.  This is a spin-off of 書簡小説 and is similar to epistolary novels, but in my schooling in Japan, I was trained to write letters to produce knowledge.  One of the reasons that I have been drawn to autobiography as a form of inquiry is that 私小説, a unique genre in Japan, is also a very familiar way for me.  This genre is translated as “I-novel” in Britannica (2006), which describes it as a self-revealing novel.  Autobiography as a form of inquiry is not unique to my “system,” while the particular organization of essays is foreign to that.  This enforcement of the particular cultural formulation of knowledge production is not wholly ascribed to the monolingual ideology, but for sure is caused by the monocultural ideology. 

Epistemicide can be also committed in another materialization of the monolingual ideology; linguistically homogeneous environments, when the classroom is isolated from the social spaces in which multilinguals and monolinguals can be in contact with one another and influence one another.  The linguistically diverse environment can be contained by monolingualism as the myth of linguistic homogeneity in the English classrooms.  In 1989, Gunther Kress in “Linguistic Processes in Sociocultural Practice” already pointed out what the dominant discourse would bring to co-habitants in a community, using a metaphor of military power: an institution’s mission is to “occupy the adjacent territory,” and “as problems continue, more territory is occupied, then settled and colonized” (p. 7).  The discourse of monolingualism categorizes other versions of English as “border skirmishes” and so contains and/or colonizes them.  Some teachers might play the role of the border police, flushing out the unwanted ideology in the linguistic contact zone in the classroom, where killing other people’s ways of knowing is supposedly unacceptable.  

There is yet another detrimental consequence; monolingualism affects and could even erase ELL’s linguistic and cultural identities. Some ELLs need to sustain their sense of belonging to their respective cultures and primary or native languages when they feel muted and invisible in a linguistically homogeneous environment.  Anzaldua (1987) states that the language that linguistically minoritized people create is “a language which they can connect their identity to, one capable of communicating the realities and values true to themselves” (p. 35).  This “their own language” represents their identity.  When their Englishes are constantly gazed at and policed so that they are easy for teachers’ ears to catch, their linguistic and cultural identities are on the verge of erasure.  Anzaldua precisely and painstakingly describes this relation between language and identity, stating blatantly that “if you want to really hurt me, talk badly about my language. Ethnic identity is twin skin to linguistic identity - I am my language” (p. 39). 

Can you hear her?Can you feel this?

THE GAZE AND THE EAR

Anzaldua’s rendition of relation to language is also corporeal and visceral.  We call a language “maternal.”  We call a language “native” or “non-native.”  Language relates to birth, mother, and blood.  When one’s language is deprived, their body and mind bleed.  On a more material level, as Derrida tells us, the moment I hear myself speaking, I am afraid of how it is taken on the other side.  When talking about the goal as a writer in the film “The Piece I am” by Greenfield-Sanders (2019), Toni Morrison said:

I didn’t want to speak for black people.  I wanted to speak to and to be among.  It’s us.  So, the first thing I have to do is to eliminate “white gaze.” ….  I wanted to knock him [a little white man on the shoulder] off, and then you are free.  Now you own the world.  I can write about anything (12:28 - 12:58)

For me the first thing I wish I could do is to disregard the monolinguals’ ears, so that I am free and I can own the world and can speak freely. 

When a language gets to others, the language travels through their bodies: their ears.  However, just as eyes are filtered with experiences, belief systems, education, culture, and so forth, so are ears.  As Derrida (1985) explicates in “Ear of the Other,” the ear is a labyrinth with “the edges, the inner walls, the passages” (p. 11).  I think that “[T]he edges, the inner walls, the passages” allude to syntax, semantics, history, experiences, etc.  In discussing autobiography in the book, Derrida states that “It is the ear of the other that signs.  The ear of the other says me to me and constitutes the autos of my autobiography” (p. 51).  And therefore he designates autobiography as “Otobiography.” The issue he brings up here is concerned about where the meaning resides.  In Derrida’s conceptualization of autobiography, it is in the reader’s “oto,” ears.   

This power that the ear of the other exerts over the written product is more contentious in education, as Derrida (1985) points out “The ear, then, is also at stake in teaching and in its new institutions” (p. 20).  This is especially so in language courses since the teachers of languages are at the same time the readers of students’ production in their languages.   Explaining how native-English speakers assess ELLs’ writing, Matsuda (1999) reveals how the former relies on their ears when they read and write.  Quoting Tony Silva’s research, Matsuda writes that ELLs’ products “exhibit[ed] less ability to revise intuitively by ear” (p. 700).  I do not think that Matsuda quotes this particular passage to draw attention to the power of “the ear of the other,” given his purpose in the article is to highlight the difference between the two disciplines, ESL and English.  However, this shows native English speakers, whether or not they are ensnared into the ideology of monolingualism, read ELLs products by the ear of the monolingual.     

In the brief history of the teaching of reading in K-12 in the U.S. after WWII, the approaches of reading have shifted and sometimes combined.  It has started with close reading promulgated by the notorious New Criticism, and then shifted to transactional reading theorized by Rosenblatt.  In addition to those two major approaches, depending on the teachers’ purposes, there are two notions of reading: reading for ideas and reading for rhetorical reading.   For the past decades, Rosenblatt’s transactional reading has been embraced so much and we, teachers of writing, also encourage the students to read by relating to the text.  However, interestingly, some teachers of writing read students’ products through the New Criticism lens, the premise of which is that the meaning is there in the text waiting to be found.  This premise is deeply rooted in the ideology of monolingualism that “we” share the same syntax, the same semantics, etc.  This assumption enables them to take a “correcting gaze” with the labyrinth of the ear.  Implementation of accelerating programs and employment of culturally responsive pedagogies in community colleges have supported financially and culturally minoritized students to survive and pursue higher education.  Yet, no matter how strongly the curriculum centers on or values students’ cultural wealth, the “correcting gaze” and “the labyrinth of the ear” that are grounded in this ideology of the monolingualism will not bring equity to linguistically minoritized students who are not allowed to bring in their rich linguistic wealths to the classroom.   Saying GoodBye to monolingual ideology and Hello to translingual orientation is paramount to bring equity to linguistically minoritized students (Honer et al., 2011; Malcolm, 2021).