32.2331, Review: Applied Linguistics: Romanowski, Guardado (2020)

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Subject: 32.2331, Review: Applied Linguistics: Romanowski, Guardado (2020)

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Date: Fri, 09 Jul 2021 17:31:21
From: Hatice Altun [haticealtun at gmail.com]
Subject: The Many Faces of Multilingualism

 
Discuss this message:
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/31/31-3294.html

EDITOR: Piotr  Romanowski
EDITOR: Martin  Guardado
TITLE: The Many Faces of Multilingualism
SUBTITLE: Language Status, Learning and Use Across Contexts
SERIES TITLE: Trends in Applied Linguistics
PUBLISHER: De Gruyter Mouton
YEAR: 2020

REVIEWER: Hatice Altun, Pamukkale University

SUMMARY

The book ''The Many Faces of Multilingualism: Language Status, Learning and
Use Across Contexts,'' edited by Piotr Romanovski and Martin Guardado, is
divided into two main parts dealing with multilingualism from sociolinguistic
and pedagogical points of view, respectively. The first part (Chapters 2-6,
pp. 11-108) adopts a sociolinguistic perspective when analyzing the concepts
of multilingualism and plurilingualism as the complex new age phenomena that
characterize today’s societies becoming even more 'super diverse' every day in
several unprecedented ways. Chapter 2 explores the linguistic landscape of
Poland, particularly the repercussions of multilingualism in the education
system. Chapter 3 focuses on the cases of language contact, maintenance, and
conflict concerning the Guarani language in Brazil and presents how Guarani
speakers try to maintain their language in Brazil. Chapter 4 dwells upon the
critical concepts of heritage language socialization in the case of a Mexican
family in Canada in relation to the parents' keen efforts to encourage using
Spanish at home. Chapter 5 focuses on multimodal communication strategies in
ELF interactions in the Philippines. Chapter 6 explores how and why German and
English lingua franca speakers refer to code alternation during enrollment
consultations.        

The second part (Chapters 7-12, pp. 109-222) offers insight into the
pedagogical perspectives about the use of multilingualism in several
educational settings. Chapter 7 researches the connection between identity and
second language proficiency through the guided narratives of four American
students in the context of study abroad in Madrid, Spain. Chapter 8
investigates the possible effects of L3 (German) and L1 (Polish) on the
pragmatic competence in English as a foreign language using a discourse
completion task that analyses interference errors. Chapter 9 focuses on the
language curriculum reform in Latvia. The chapter examines the students'
performance in the school exit examinations in relation to the plurilingual
repertoire level descriptions of the 2018 Common European Framework (CEFR).
The following chapter discusses the plurilingualistic paradigm shift in the
context of teaching Maltese as a foreign language. Chapter 11 highlights the
need for intercultural and interlingual educational approaches in schools and
offers some strategies to teachers to overcome communication conflicts in
multilingual classrooms. Chapter 12 explores teachers' conceptions about the
use of translanguaging to improve students' subject knowledge content and
questions the English-only pedagogies to teach the range of subject areas such
as math, science, computer, etc. And the book ends with a commentary chapter.
What follows is the summary of the whole book chapter by chapter.

Chapter 1, ''Introduction: The Many Faces of Multilingualism,'' by one of the
editors, Piotr Romanowski (pp. 1-8), presents the reader a synopsis of the
individual studies mentioned in the book and offers some insight as to how
multilingualism is handled in several research settings through diverse
methodologies and perspectives. Romanowski discusses multilingualism as an
individual versus societal construct and dwells upon some key concepts like
code alteration, interlingual education, translanguaging, language contact,
and multilingual identity, all highlighted in the chapters. The writer ends
the chapter with a practical overview of the two parts in the book addressing
individual chapters' settings, methodologies, and participants.    

Chapter 2, ''The Polish Linguistic Map: An Overview of Minority Languages in
the Education System'' by Piotr Romanowski (pp. 11-24), presents a detailed
account of minority languages in Poland established in the 2011 National
Census. The chapter puts forth how these languages are used as both a medium
of instruction and a subject of study in the Polish education system based on
the 2018/2019 Education Report prepared by the Polish Statistics Office. The
chapter starts with the basics and presents the readers with a definition of
what a minority language is and explains the legal regulations about the
minority languages within the nation-states, then describes the minority
languages territorially and historically in Poland. Like many other
monolingual nation-states, Poland promotes the standard majority language at
the expense of minority languages. Yet Romanowski acknowledges that the Polish
State also recognizes the nine national (e.g., Lithuanian, Ukrainian,
Belarusian, German), four ethnic (e.g., Karaim, Tatar), and one regional
(i.e., Kashubian) minority languages within the borders of Poland. Based on
the Education Report data for the 2018/2019 academic year in Poland,
Romanowski appreciates the Polish State's financial support to promote
bilingual education about minority groups in public schools. However, the
minority groups' efforts to promote their languages remain a more definitive
act to determine the future of the language within the educational system.
Polish Lithuanians develop a fully bilingual school curriculum, and along with
Ukrainian, they were able to keep Lithuanian as one of the minority languages
offered as a language of instruction. However, the number of Belarusian
minority children learning Belarusian is decreasing, and Karaims and Tatars
suffer the loss of their languages. 

Chapter 3, ''Language Contact, Maintenance, and Conflict: The case of the
Guarani Language in Brazil'' by Edenize Ponzo Peres, Kyria Rebeca Finardi, and
Polina Claudiano Calazans (pp. 25-37), adopts an explorative stance about the
use of Guarani, an indigenous language spoken in the state of Espirito Santo
(ES) in Brazil. The authors first provide the readers with the sociohistorical
development of Guarani in several settings in South America, particularly in
ES, Brazil. In the past, Brazil has taken a reductionist approach to recognize
minority languages; however, in recent years, language policies in the country
have developed a more inclusive attitude towards indigenous and immigrant
languages. Taking their cue from the observations of the Mbya Guarani's
perceptions about the maintenance or loss of their languages in relation to
their history and religion, the authors analyze the sociolinguistic situation
of Guarani about the Language Vitality and Endangerment document (UNESCO 2003)
and with regard to the data from Calazan (2014). The authors appreciate Mbya
Guarani's effort to ensure that their language survives and is not displaced
by Portuguese in ES. The authors also observe that, in educational domains,
only Portuguese is used as a medium of instruction at the expense of other
minority languages and cultures. Thus, they conclude the chapter by suggesting
more inclusive teaching materials and approaches that also meet the indigenous
people's needs in Brazil.

Chapter 4, ''My Gain Would Have Been Their Loss'': Key Factors in the Heritage
Language Socialization and Policies of a Middle-class Mexican Family in
Canada'' by Martin Guardado (pp. 39-61), highlights the efforts of a Mexican
couple to socialize their three daughters into ideologies of linguistic
equality and hybrid transnational identities. The complex heritage language
socialization of the family is analyzed through an ethnography and discourse
analysis. The parents made a deliberate choice to focus on Spanish for their
home interactions to help their children's multilingual development even
though the mother had her own socialization issues in Canada, mainly due to
her lack of a good command of English. However, she preferred to speak in
Spanish to her daughters at home at the expense of her own loss in terms of
English language proficiency. Spanish maintenance helps the family to
reinforce their first culture identities as well. Guardado discusses the
heritage language socialization processes of the family in different domains
such as home culture visits, home interactions, and school experience of the
children, all of which help the reader see the process from different angles.
The author concludes that the deep investment of the parents in heritage
language socialization enabled the children to be capable of using both
languages effectively in the appropriate contexts, often blurring the line
between the notions of mother tongue, first and second languages. Throughout
the chapter, Guardado demonstrates the fluid and unstable nature of language
socialization by emphasizing the perceptions and perspectives of the parents
about language, locality, multilingualism, and transnationalism.

Chapter 5, ''Gesture Sequences and Turn-taking Strategies in Communication
Settings in the Multilingual Philippines'' by Hiroki Hanamoto (pp. 63-83),
points out a neglected research tradition in applied linguistics, i.e.,
multimodal analysis using conversation analysis. After providing a theoretical
background and support about the functions of gestures in ELF conversations,
the author meticulously presents the procedural details of the study. Hanamoto
analyzes the gesture sequences and turn-taking strategies during two
face-to-face ELF conversations between two Japanese students and two Filipina
instructors to find out how each student-teacher pair overcomes their
communicative difficulties in one-to-one language classes. He found that the
participants use gestures to achieve mutual understanding in an ELF learning
context. Gestures have several other functions like enhancing explicitness,
building rapport, and making explicit corrections. Hanamoto concludes that the
exploitation of gestures in interaction with or without speech has several
benefits for interlocutors and speakers, and thus gestures should be
incorporated as multimodal interactional resources for successful
communications in language learning contexts. The author suggests that
focusing on multimodal communication strategies offers promising research
opportunities for multilingualism studies.   

Chapter 6, ''The Phenomenon of Code Alternation by Multilingual Speakers'' by
Anna Khalizova (pp. 84-106), acquaints the reader with the phenomenon of code
alternation among multilingual and multicultural international students,
exploring their interviews in German and English in an enrollment office at a
German university. Khalizova first discusses the institutional discourse and
interactions, which form the basis for the focal background for the
ethnographic study. Then she walks the reader through the specifics of
conversation analysis to code-switching, transfer, and code alternation as
less frequently referred methodologies in lingua franca interactions in
institutional settings. As a result of her analysis based on the conversation
analysis of a corpus of video and audio interactions of students from 49
countries and their consultants, she found that several types of
code-switching (i.e., participant-related and preference-related) occur in the
data set. She further explains that competence-related code-switching was the
most frequent strategy to ensure mutual understanding in situations in which
counselors work with multiple students simultaneously.  Or it is used in cases
where the counselors attempt to switch between the languages but cannot adapt
immediately. Chapter 6 is the last chapter of the first part of the book.   

Chapter 7, ''Identity and Language Proficiency in Study Abroad: A Case Study
of Four Multilingual and Multicultural Students'' by Asución Martínez-Arbelaiz
and Isabel Pereira (pp. 109-125), investigates the relationship between four
American undergraduate students' language proficiency in Spanish and their
second language identities through case studies in which written texts
produced by the students are analyzed by focusing on form and content. The
authors review identity research in L2 and study abroad contexts that
highlight different domains of identity such as language proficiency
attainment, investment, and L2 mediated personal development. They thus form
the basis of their explorative study. The content analysis of the two written
tasks was conducted through the lenses of complexity, accuracy, and fluency.
The results showed that two advanced students were better at investing
themselves in the local culture and language. These two students were more
enthusiastic about interacting with the locals and therefore validated their
L2 identities thanks to their more positive attitude both toward themselves
and the locals. Martínez-Arbelaiz and Pereira call for more longitudinal
research about L2 identity and L2 proficiency attainment. They also recommend
instructors in study abroad contexts to design language tasks that require
more authentic interactions with the local community.

Chapter 8, ''The influence of the Mother Tongue and L3 on Learning Pragmatics
in EFL among Poles'' by Anna Szczepaniak-Kozak (pp. 127-144), is based on a
longitudinal study concerning pragmatic competence and interference errors
based on a discourse completion task by Polish philology students who learned
English (L2) and German (L3) as foreign languages . The author starts the
chapter by highlighting the studies of pragmatic competence research centering
on the interlanguage continuum of multilingual students. In her study, almost
150 students' ability to produce apologies and requests is investigated
through a discourse completion task repeated over three years. The instances
of transfer from the students' L1 and L3 to their L2 are explored in the
qualitative data analysis. Szczepaniak-Kozak found students' Polish-L1 had
more impact on their interference errors in English than did their L3-German.
She calls for further research about the use of more speech acts or pragmatic
features or speech events that could offer further insight into the
relationship between languages in a multilingual language learning setting.  

Chapter 9, ''Curriculum Reform in Latvia: A Move from Multilingual to
Plurilingual Education'' by Vita Kalnbērziņa (pp. 145-161), is about how to
improve high school students' performance on language achievement tests by
addressing plurilingualistic descriptions in 2018 CEFR in the context of
language curriculum reform in Latvia. The author first introduces the notion
of plurilingualism as an individual language speaker performance and compares
it to multilingualism as societal use of languages; then, she describes
curricular approaches to plurilingualism in Europe and Latvia, a multilingual
country where languages are taught in a compartmentalized way. The description
of state curriculum reform processes about 2018 CEFR is examined in four
stages in the research context of Latvia. Kalnbērziņa emphasizes the
importance of context in language education in Europe. She interprets the
research as showing that language curriculum reforms that integrate all the
languages in society are rather challenging tasks due to both the different
structural, phonological and lexical nature of the languages at play and the
societal urge to compartmentalize the languages taught at schools. However,
the contextual aspect of CEFR is easy to integrate into the curriculum thanks
to the compatibility of multilingual policies with the Latvian education
system.    

Chapter 10, ''Pluralistic Approaches in Foreign Language Education: Examples
of Implementation from Malta'' by Antoinette Camilleri Grima (pp. 163-186), is
another chapter centering on plurilingualism. Camilleri Grima accentuates the
paradigm shift in language teaching due to multiculturalism and
multilingualism witnessed in educational contexts almost everywhere in the
world today. She describes the specifics about the plurilingualistic paradigm
shift about foreign language teaching and presents the related literature
review of studies that exemplify different procedures and methodologies in
relation to plurilingualistic approaches in education. The author introduces
the Council of Europe's framework of reference, 'Framework of Reference for
Pluralinguistic Approaches to Languages and Cultures (FREPA),' which provides
practitioners with reference points to identify the competencies and
intellectual resources available to plurilingual people. She also introduces
four other pluralistic approaches, i.e., Intercomprehension, The Integrated
Didactic Approach, Awakening to Languages, The Intercultural Approach, all of
which are apparent in FREPA. Then she presents the reader with some practical
implementation examples of these approaches and FREPA in teaching Maltese as a
foreign language. Despite the strong evidence from the literature in support
of pluralistic approaches, Camilleri Grima warns the practitioners about the
challenges that they can encounter in educational settings due to several
policies and curriculum requirements and points out that there is a pressing
need for appropriate teaching materials based on the implementation of
pluralistic approaches. 

Chapter 11, ''Interlingual Education in the Classroom: An Action Guide to
Overcoming Communication Conflicts'' by Natalia Barranco-Izquierdo and M.
Teresa Calderón-Quindós (pp. 187-207-205), focuses on the multilingual and
multicultural classrooms in the European context and offers an innovative
pedagogical guideline to practitioners to develop more inclusive learning
environments. The authors base their discussion about the need for the
implementation of linguistically more supportive interlingual strategies on
European policies aiming to improve immigrant education at primary and
secondary schools in the first section of the chapter. Then they introduce the
principles of ''interlingual education'' as an extension of the intercultural
approach and suggest oral mediation as a remedy to overcome conflicts arising
from diverse languages and cultures in a multilingual classroom. The last
section of the chapter highlights the action guidelines in several steps, such
as planning, execution, and evaluation for teachers about how to develop
all-embracing learning environments.     

Chapter 12, ''Transcending Linguistic Boundaries in Higher Education Pedagogy:
The Role of Translanguaging and Lecturers'' by Vimbai Mbrimi-Hungwe (pp.
207-221), inquiries into the perceptions of science lecturers exploiting
translanguaging in a higher education context in Africa through a qualitative
study. Mbrimi-Hungwe overviews the multilingual South African context and
criticizes colonial ideology prioritizing English as the most prestigious
language. She presents a translanguaging framework to enact social justice in
terms of linguistic hierarchies. Her open-ended questionnaire analysis showed
that the majority of the lecturers are against the idea of using any language
in their classes but English. Mbrimi-Hungwe, therefore, argues that more
awareness-raising support should be provided for the faculty who teach
multilingual students. This chapter ends the second part of the book. 

Chapter 13, ''Bringing it all Together: Multilingualism in Family, Society,
and Education'' by Martin Guardado, the other editor of the book (pp.
223-231), is a commentary that synthesizes the 11 chapters (2-12) in both
parts of the book and presents how they weave together and contribute to the
understanding of multilingualism on both pedagogical and societal levels.
Guardado revisits and summarizes the key terms mentioned in the studies
throughout the book.    

EVALUATION

This book is a fine collection of cutting-edge research articles centering on
multilingualism and changing trends in this field. The articles deal with
multilingualism as an omnipresent worldwide construct at several interactions
from individual to social and institutional environments. The book foregrounds
currently relevant topics in relation to multilingualism like plurilingualism,
translanguaging, interlingualism, and intercomprehension. The role of English
in connection with multilingualism is also investigated. The studies in the
book think over the role of education, particularly higher education, to
develop multilingual programs to facilitate and enhance different aspects of
individual, domestic, societal, and institutional interactions in diverse,
multilingual contexts from twelve countries. The intriguing research topics
concerning various aspects of multilingualism explore the role of study abroad
programs, identity construction in other languages, international student
internship, heritage language in the family, indigenous languages,
multimodalities in ELF classroom interactions, language policy, language
contact, and language planning.

Camilleri Grima (Chapter 10) argues that a paradigm shift in applied
linguistics is occurring now due to global mobility. Guardado (Chapter 13)
also supports the idea that monolingual English-only pedagogies are no longer
responding to the needs of today's language learning environments when
considering the plurilingual individuals and multilingual communities in these
settings. The rest of the book is a reflection of this perspective;
particularly, Chapters 7, 11, and 12, in this sense, present broadened
research settings with diverse research variables, which solidifies this
paradigm shift. The other agenda of the book in relation to this paradigm
shift is social justice provided through language teaching. The exploration of
social justice centers on individual language speakers as they are the micro
representations of the community where they live. In that regard, Chapter 3
puts forth the struggles of indigenous people to maintain their languages and
have a fair share in the macro society. Chapter 6 presents how the outcome of
language use, i.e., code- alternation, can be an individual means to empower a
language learner in a lingua franca interaction. And Chapter 12 shows how
translanguaging can serve the purpose of challenging the ideological stances
that stem from colonialism in South Africa at a discourse community in the
broader society. The rest of the chapters in the book fit well into this
social justice paradigm shift in applied linguistics as well.    

A variety of qualitative research methodologies are presented in the book:
linguistic landscaping (Chapter 2, 3, 9), interviews (Chapter 2, 4, 7, 12),
ethnography (Chapter 4), discourse analysis (Chapter 4), conversation analysis
(Chapter 6, 5), multimodal analysis (Chapter 5), document analysis (Chapter 3,
9, 10), longitudinal discourse completion task (Chapter 9) and guided
narratives (Chapter 7). The use of such multifaceted methodologies is also
another strength of the book. The reader would welcome the change in research
perspectives and appreciate their innovativeness and accessibility when
applied within their research areas. The only chapters that made me ask for
more details are Chapters 5, 6 and 7. Chapter 5 could have elaborated more on
the classification of multimodalities and their functions; Chapter 6 could
have provided the reader with more concrete examples of language alternation;
Chapter 7 could make the reader question how the authors captured the identity
changes through simple narratives in such a short period. Or again, in Chapter
4, the impact of class on the heritage language is not clear enough. Greater
detail in these chapters could broaden the understanding of the presented
methodologies and the related results.

The book focuses on the global South as a multilingual and multicultural
research context with its multilingual researchers. I agree with Guardado in
his comment that these attributes make this volume a substantial resource book
for studying multilingualism and its repercussions in the field. The wide
range of topics, speaker groups, situations, and languages examined in this
collection demonstrate the significance and omnipresence of multilingualism.
Thus, it is apprehensible why the editors picked research from the global
South as it is the context where multilingualism is more visible in social
arenas, and its effects on the individuals are more tangible. However, today
there is almost no place where multilingualism is not observed. For the sake
of diversity, some expanding circle contexts such as Russia, Japan, or Turkey
could have been included in the selection. These countries are considered
monolingual but today experience multilingualism due to migration,
accelerating refugee populations, or an increasing number of international
students. Therefore, research studies from these contexts could have also
contributed to the exploration of “the many faces of multilingualism'' and the
tensions it has created in these communities in terms of language planning or
identity politics. Throughout, all the chapters show the need for more
scholarly research in the vast area of multilingualism in diverse contexts in
the world. The book is a worthwhile read and an invaluable resource for all
who are interested in multilingualism.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

HATICE ALTUN, PhD, is an instructor in the School of Foreign Languages,
Pamukkale University, Turkey. Her major research interests lie in areas of
bi/multilingualism, discourse analysis, study-abroad and higher education
research. Email: haticealtun at gmail.com





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