Book Review: Multilingualism: Auer & Wei (2007)

[Harold Schiffman]

Review: Multilingualism: Auer & Wei (2007)
Date: 07-Dec-2007
From: Randall Eggert <randylinguistlist.org>

Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/18/18-1408.html
EDITORS: Auer, Peter; Wei, Li
TITLE: Handbook of Multilingualism and Multilingual Communication
SERIES: Handbooks of Applied Linguistics [HAL] 5
YEAR: 2007
PUBLISHER: Mouton de Gruyter

Jean-Jacques Weber, Departments of English and Education, University
of Luxembourg

SUMMARY

In the Introduction to this new volume in the prestigious Handbooks of
Applied Linguistics series, the editors emphasize that multilingualism
is not a problem but is sometimes seen as a problem due to the
continuing dominance of ideologies of monolingualism and homogeneism
in many spheres of public life:

If, then, this handbook is concerned with problems that arise through
and surrounding multilingualism, it should be clear that these
problems are not ''natural'' problems which are inherent to
multilingualism itself; rather, they arise out of a certain context in
which this multilingualism is seen as a problem (3).

They conclude that multilingualism is in fact part of the solution to
many social problems because of its ''bridge-building potential –
bridges between different groups within the nation, bridges with
groups beyond the artificial boundaries of a nation, and bridges for
cross-fertilization between cultures'' (12). _The Handbook of
Multilingualism and Multilingual Communication_ contributes to this
agenda not only by helping with the social rehabilitation of
multilingualism but also by making available in a compact form the
latest
research results in the study of multilingualism. The Handbook is
divided into four sections, ''Becoming Bilingual'', ''Staying
Bilingual'', ''Acting Multilingual'' and ''Living in a Multilingual
Society.''

The first three chapters explore the topic of ''bringing up children
bi- or multilingually'' from a psychological perspective (Johanne
Paradis' ''Early bilingual and multilingual acquisition''), an
interactional perspective (Elizabeth Lanza's ''Multilingualism and the
family'') and a Language Socialization perspective (Patricia
Baquedano-López and Shlomy Kattan's ''Growing up in a multilingual
community: Insights from language socialization''). I will come back
to Paradis' chapter in the Evaluation section below, so I focus here
on the other two chapters. Lanza studies the influence of the family
on early bilingual acquisition and identifies a number of approaches
which help to map out the most important factors involved in fostering
family bilingualism: she particularly singles out language ideological
approaches – because the attitudes and beliefs of parents and the
society can play a role in bilingual acquisition – and interactional
analyses of parent-child conversations. In her interesting discussion
of the latter framework, she shows how parents' discourse strategies
can (consciously or unconsciously) socialize children into language
separation or code-switching.

Baquedano-López and Kattan explore how Language Socialization
understands the processes of becoming multilingual (they use capital
letters because they refer to the field of study initiated by such
scholars as Elinor Ochs and Bambi Schieffelin). Research in this area
is longitudinal, ethnographic, descriptive and analytic, and provides
a socioculturally situated view of these processes.
Just like Lanza, the authors highlight the concept of language
ideologies which, they argue, ''has been most central in understanding
language choice and language shift as linked to notions of ethnicity
and ... to notions of identity'' (87).

The last chapters in this section are Jean-Marc Dewaele's ''Becoming
bi- or multi-lingual later in life'' and Colin Baker's ''Becoming
bilingual through bilingual education.'' Dewaele reviews both
quantitative and qualitative research in the field and calls for
interdisciplinary work that combines these methodologies: ''Only a
concerted interdisciplinary effort will allow a more global and
profound understanding of the feelings and behaviour of adult
bilinguals'' (123). He shows how people's attitudes and feelings about
their languages influence their language behaviour and help to explain
changes in their linguistic repertoires. What he seems to be talking
about here is language ideologies – which are defined as ''beliefs, or
feelings, about languages as used in their social worlds'' in
Kroskrity (2004: 498) and whose importance was stressed in the two
previous chapters, though Dewaele himself does not use this
terminology. It may be that the language ideological and Language
Socialization approaches are just the ones that could lead to the more
''global and profound understanding'' that he is calling for.

Baker provides a useful typology of bilingual education and discusses
the effectiveness of the different models. The 'strong' version of
bilingual education (where subject content is taught through two
languages) is consistently presented as the most positive model,
though of course the diversity and heterogeneity of children from a
wide range of linguistic backgrounds in today's urban neighbourhoods
and global cities makes the 'right' choice of bilingual education an
increasingly challenging - though not impossible - task (see also
Horner and Weber 2008).

Section 2 (''Staying Bilingual'') opens with two chapters which focus
on this question of educational provision for bilingual children with
a migration background: ''Bilingual children in monolingual schools''
by J. Normann Jørgensen and Pia Quist, and ''From minority programmes
to multilingual education'' by Guus Extra. Jørgensen and Quist's
chapter is divided into two parts: in the first, they report on the
results of the Køge Project, a longitudinal study of the linguistic
development of Turkish-Danish students in monolingual Danish schools.
Interestingly, they show how different patterns of language use
correlate with differences between boys' and girls' identity work. In
the second part, they discuss the Norwegian (and other European)
debates about linguistic minority children's schooling and the part
played in these debates by language ideologies such as the one nation
– one language ideology. As for Extra, he describes the positive
contributions of such educational schemes as ''muttersprachlicher
Unterricht'' (mother-tongue education) in North Rhine-Westphalia and
the LOTE (Languages Other Than English) programme in the Australian
State of Victoria. He closes his chapter with some critical comments
on the European elite discourses of trilingualism, which are concerned
with national and regional minority
languages but not immigrant minority languages.

In ''From biliteracy to pluriliteracies'', Ofelia García, Lesley
Bartlett and JoAnne Kleifgen develop an eclectic framework for the
analysis of plurilingual and multimodal literacy practices within
their sociocultural contexts, and call for new pedagogies to break
through the ideologies of strict language compartmentalization that
still prevail in many educational institutions. Monika Rothweiler's
''Multilingualism and Specific Language Impairment (SLI)'' shows that
there is no connection between multilingualism and SLI (SLI has
congenital causes and is not an acquired disease), and warns that
multilingual children may be falsely diagnosed as suffering from SLI
due to inappropriate uses of monolingual-based testing procedures.
Manfred Pienemann and Jörg-U. Keßler
(''Measuring bilingualism'') point to problems in the measurement of
individual bilingualism and advocate a cross-linguistic comparative
measurement technique based on Pienemann's Processability Theory.

Most of the chapters in Section 3 ''Acting Multilingual'' deal with various
aspects of code-switching. Joseph Gafaranga, in his ''Code-switching as a
conversational strategy'', provides an overview of research from the diglossia
model via identity-related explanations to organizational accounts. Garafanga
himself adds a view of code-switching as an aspect of the overall (and not just
local) organization of bilingual conversation. He concludes that all these
approaches are complementary and are needed to capture the multi-facetedness of
language alternation phenomena. Pieter Muysken (''Mixed codes'') discusses the
social conditions under which mixed codes emerge as well as the
psycholinguistic
processes by which they emerge.

Benjamin Bailey's ''Multilingual forms of talk and identity work'' is a
refreshingly different chapter as it does not just provide an overview of
previous research but mostly presents the author's own ideas and examples.
Bailey is interested in the identity-related function of code-switching and
presents detailed analyses of bilingual talk that illustrate how identity work
is done through metaphorical switches. He also discusses the monolingual
ideology that still informs some academic work on multilingualism and argues
that multilingualism needs to be studied as a dimension of social and political
practice. In ''Crossing - negotiating social boundaries'', Quist and Jørgensen
examine one particular case of code-switching, namely language crossing. They
distinguish between mocking and non-mocking uses of crossing as well
as outgroup
and ingroup mocking, and claim that stylisation is often based on media
stereotypes. They provide a stimulating analysis of two examples of crossing by
Danish students, showing that the way in which the crossing is interpreted
depends on the speaker's position in the local peer network.

The last three chapters in this section look at various aspects of
multilingualism in the workplace. In a somewhat slight piece, Dennis Day and
Johannes Wagner (''Bilingual professionals'') present some comments on language
policy in (e.g.) Danish sports clubs and linguistic interaction – especially
lingua franca interaction – in multinational companies. Celia Roberts'
''Multilingualism in the workplace'' is a more thorough and
comprehensive review
of research in the field which also includes a discussion of sociopolitical
issues of power, discrimination and exclusion. Finally, David C.S. Li, in
''Multilingualism and commerce'', mentions a rather eclectic
collection of aspects
illustrating how the global economy impacts upon both societal and individual
multilingualism.

Section 4, ''Living in a Multilingual Society'', is introduced by John Edwards'
''Societal multilingualism: reality, recognition and response''. His
discussion of
language legislation and language rights, linguistic ecology and the
classification of language-contact situations is extended in the two following
chapters, ''Multilingualism of autochthonous minorities'' by Penelope
Gardner-Chloros and ''Multilingualism of new minorities (in migratory
contexts)''
by Peter Martin. These two chapters complement each other in the sense that the
former looks at ''old'' or autochthonous minority languages such as Alsatian in
France (including the sensitive issue of the relation between Alsatian and
German), and the latter investigates ''new'' or immigrant minority languages,
especially in the UK. At the same time, the authors are careful to point out
that the distinction between the two is not clear-cut but rather a continuum.

The last two chapters of the Handbook follow Bailey's call for a discussion of
the politics of multilingualism. In ''Multilingualism in ex-colonial
countries,''
Christopher Stroud explores the dynamics of multilingualism in two ex-colonial
multilingual states, Singapore and Mozambique, while Monica Heller, in
''Multilingualism and transnationalism'', examines the tensions and
paradoxes that
traverse transnational multilingualism. She ends her chapter (and the volume)
with a spirited call for a new ''multi-sited sociolinguistics of transnational
multilingualism'' (547).

EVALUATION
At the beginning of this review, I mentioned that the editors in their
Introduction argue that multilingualism is frequently seen as a problem due to
the continuing dominance of essentialist assumptions and ideologies. What is
rather disturbing is that traces of such assumptions can be found in the
Handbook itself. Thus, in chapter 1, the ''multilingualism as a
problem'' ideology
raises its ugly head when Paradis keeps debating the question whether
bilinguals
''lag behind'' monolinguals in their acquisition rates in one or both their
languages (17). ''Lag behind'' is used six times in this context, along with
related expressions such as ''score below'' (repeated three times in
the chapter),
so that the reader gets the impression of a ''first past the post'' underlying
assumption: phonological or lexical or morphosyntactic acquisition is presented
as if it were a race where the only thing that matters is coming first.
Monolingual development is looked upon as the norm, and what seems to be
forgotten is that bilinguals are in the process of acquiring two linguistic
varieties, so they can hardly be seen as ''lagging behind'' or indeed as taking
part in the same ''race'' as monolinguals. In the very last sentence of her
chapter Paradis displays a critical awareness of these assumptions, but the
chapter would have been so much better if it had been informed as a whole by
such an awareness.

Paradis' chapter is not the only one in which such assumptions and ideologies
are relied upon, though they are rejected in other chapters of the
Handbook. Let
me give two examples: while Edwards (451) problematizes the concept of
mother-tongue, Extra relies on it in his discussion of ''mother-tongue
education''
in Germany. He seems to endorse the mother-tongue ideology that (migrant)
children have one and only one mother-tongue, whereas the actual language
situation of these children is frequently far more complex (see chapter 14 of
the Handbook, where Quist and Jørgensen warn that ''the school as an
institution
often categorizes speakers according to linguistic or ethnic origin, ignoring
among other things the fact that many bilinguals in urban, western communities
grow up in mixed families with different linguistic and ethnic backgrounds''
(377); cf. also Weber (forthcoming)).

Finally, Bailey insists on the need to look upon concepts such as language and
multilingualism as socially constructed, just like race and ethnicity. Other
contributors, however, use these concepts in a rather uncritical way. Dewaele,
for instance, complains that much previous research ignored whether
''bilinguals
were in fact trilinguals, quadrilinguals or pentalinguals'', and adds
that there
is a need in future research for ''finer distinctions and
categorizations'' (106).
But he does not seem to be aware that these ''finer ... categorizations'' are
themselves in need of being problematized: what counts as a separate language;
how do ''mixed codes'' (see Muysken's chapter) count, etc.? Rothweiler
relies upon
a similarly uncritical use of the concept of language when she talks about very
young children's acquisition of German in their homes. She fails to make
explicit which variety of German they are acquiring. Hence, the children's
''errors'' may not be indicative of Specific Language Impairment but
could simply
be errors of Standard German. Indeed, the underlying Chomskyan assumptions of
her discussion (e.g. ''inborn language acquisition faculty'' and ''critical
period'', 238) make one worry about the conclusions drawn, in
particular as these
diagnoses can have very serious consequences for the children concerned. The
continuing dominance of such essentialist assumptions and ideologies in some
academic work also makes me wonder whether we perhaps urgently need a Handbook
(showing the importance of) taking a language ideological approach to
multilingualism.

REFERENCES
Horner, Kristine and Jean-Jacques Weber (forthcoming) The language situation in
Luxembourg. _Current Issues in Language Planning_.

Kroskrity, Paul V. (2004) Language ideologies. In A. Duranti (ed.) _A Companion
to Linguistic Anthropology_. Oxford: Blackwell. 496-517.

Weber, Jean-Jacques (forthcoming) Safetalk revisited, or: Language and ideology
in Luxembourgish educational policy. _Language and Education_.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Jean-Jacques Weber is Professor of English and Education at the
University of Luxembourg. His main research area is the study of
language and education in multilingual and multicultural contexts
(such as Luxembourg). He has also published extensively on stylistics
and discourse analysis.

http://linguistlist.org/issues/18/18-3681.html

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