Monolingual Norms and Multilingual Realities

In our days of frequent border crossings, and of multilingual multicultural foreign language classrooms, it is appropriate to rethink the monolingual native speaker norms as the target of foreign language education. As we revisit the marked and unmarked forms of language usership, I propose that we make the intercultural speaker the unmarked form, the infinite of language use, and the monolingual monocultural speaker a slowly disappearing species or a nationalistic myth.

(Kramsch, 1998: 30)

We reach here the very principle of myth: it transforms history into nature.

(Barthes, 1972: 129)

Code Choice in the Classroom, the Classroom in Society

The purpose of this book is to provide language teachers, teachers in training and teacher trainers with a conceptual and curricular framework for rethinking what happens in the classroom in terms of multiple codes. Code choice in classroom communication is admittedly a frequent and central concern for teachers and students. For teachers, it usually has to do with preventing students from using their first language (L1); for students, it is often about how to use the L1 and still function and succeed in the language classroom. In scholarship on second language (L2) learning, code choice has remained, for the most part, a tangential concern. A second purpose of this book is, then, to move the issue of code choice to a more central place in our thinking about L2 theory, curriculum, practice and research.

It is no accident that the title of this book emphasizes code choice rather than code-switching, because much of what I will argue is based on learner choices in classroom interaction and teacher choices in curriculum design and teaching practice. For the typical high school or university student in the USA, whether or not to study an L2 is often not a matter of choice. But most other aspects of the endeavor are: which language to study, when to study, how much energy or effort to invest in it, whether and when to speak the language (except when called on by the teacher), and crucially, whether one should buy into using the L2 in the contexts in which the instructor and the curriculum mandate. Unfortunately, many students are probably not aware of many of these choices as they make them. Our job as curriculum designers and teachers, then, is to find ways of raising learners' awareness of choice, of facilitating the management of code-switching in classroom conversation, which means raising awareness of which language to use, with whom, when and why. The larger purpose of this endeavor is to provide students with affordances for language learning through multiple code use in the classroom, and ultimately to help them become bilingual users of L1 and L2. It is also to help teachers and learners to recognize and realize the language classroom's potential, not just for learning a new language and culture, but to make critical intercultural connections about language, discourses and life.

To accomplish these goals, we must develop an approach to treating the language classroom as an authentic social environment in its own right, rather than as an artificial aberration from normal social life, and for promoting learner autonomy by allowing learners a say in the ways code choices are made. For language professionals, whether researchers or classroom teachers, this book seeks to call attention to an area of instructed L2 learning that has received relatively little attention, and actually no attention at all in some of the areas of inquiry in which it would be most needed.

In its current 'post-methods' form (Kumaravadivelu, 2003; Richards & Rodgers, 2001: 244), L2 teaching and learning is a varied and sophisticated contrivance, striving to be a virtual second-language and second-culture environment within four walls and against the clock of perpetually inadequate numbers of instructional contact hours. In recent years, numerous scholars have called our attention to many problematic aspects of the ways we understand this ostensibly artificial microcosm (Atkinson, 2002; Breen, 1985; Firth & Wagner, 1997; Kumaravadivelu, 2003, 2005; Lantolf & Appel, 1994; Reagan & Osborn, 2002; Savignon, 2002; Schulz, 2006; Tudor, 2001; van Lier, 1988). One of these aspects is that, by and large, a monolingual set of norms and ideals is assumed and applied to classroom practices (Blyth, 1995; Butzkamm, 2003; V.J. Cook, 2001; Kramsch, 1997, 1998, 2009; Turnbull & Dailey-O'Cain, 2009). We proceed with the assumption that if the instructor teaches in the L2 and students carry out activities in the same code, then the lingua franca of the classroom is the L2. At worst, we stigmatize the use of the L1. At best, we often see little pedagogical value in its use (Macaro, 2001). Considering the limited number of contact hours of most university language courses, this is understandable; most instructors rightly seek to use every available minute for meaningful L2 communication. Yet, as observed and demonstrated empirically by some scholars, the language classroom is a multilingual environment (Antón & DiCamilla, 1999; Belz, 2002, 2003; Blyth, 1995; Chavez, 2003; V.J. Cook, 1999, 2001; Kramsch, 1997, 1998; Levine, 2003, 2005; Liebscher & Dailey-O'Cain, 2004). This means that for each learner, at least two languages are involved in the L2 learning process. For us to deny, in our pedagogy, a role for the cognitively and socially dominant language, is to ignore a large part of the L2 learning process and the individual learner's personal experience. With an increasing acceptance of eclectic and critical approaches to language teaching and learning and of pedagogical implementation of ecological and sociocultural approaches, the time is ripe for the development of a principled, multilingual approach to language classroom communication.

Code Choice and Language Pedagogy

The multilingual approach I propose proceeds from four working assumptions about code choice and language teaching and learning. First, the curricular proposals presented in this book do not mean that the classroom should seek to re-create the norms of societal multilingual environments (V.J. Cook, 2001). Just as the assumption of a monolingual norm is naïve and insufficient on its own, so too is the assumption that it is equivalent to a multilingual environment outside the classroom. The contrived nature of communication in most language classrooms is ubiquitous (compared with non-instructional learning environments; see van Lier, 1988, 1996; Wenger, 1998), and any pedagogy considering code choice must...