Multilingualism, Language, and Ideology Across Time and Space

Download or read book Multilingualism, Language, and Ideology Across Time and Space written by Madina Djuraeva and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this dissertation, I consider the role of broader sociocultural, political, historical, and economic factors in shaping learners' (and speakers') experiences of becoming and being multilingual, through a focus on Central Asian multilingual communities. This primarily contributes to holistic approaches in research on multilingual learners in education by accounting for a number of intertwined aspects of multilingual lived experiences including policy, migration, education, and belonging. In this dissertation, I demonstrate that pathways to becoming and being multilingual learners, speakers, and users are socially constructed, multiscale decisions, which are not decisions only about language, but also about moral, civic, and transnational identities that participants co-construct in dialogue with the larger sociopolitical, historical and economic trends. The analysis of larger social context in the narratives of learning adds to a further theorization of the situated nature of identity and language showing how multilinguals constantly re-appropriate their attitudes towards their languages according to times, spaces, places, and people they invoke in their narrative event. I show that only by attending to these various aspects of the narrative can we fully comprehend the narrative inconsistencies. For instance, I demonstrate that an attention to unconscious aspects of participant discourses is useful in distinguishing between the ways participants construct their linguistic repertoire as native or non-native when orienting to national and international norms, or hybrid when invoking stories of daily language use. This work is ethnographic and my data come from over 80 hours of audio recordings of loosely and semi-structured individual and focus group interviews with Central Asian multilinguals, casual conversations between them, their friends and family, along with participant observation at social events. Across these different contexts, I examine the use of evaluative and affective language, modalization, voicing, deictics, unconscious elements of experience, narrating and narrated events, and participant metacommentary about particular languages, educational spaces, and events in their lives, to show how these multilinguals discursively (re)imagine moral norms for behavior, deficit in language education, agency and individual investment, linguistic (in)security and ownership, as well as nativeness and non-nativeness by orienting to the past, present and future in their narratives of lived experience. In Chapter 5, I argue that for Central Asian multilinguals, the decision about language education is also a decision based on moral values. In doing so, I analyze the discursive construction of moral behavioral scripts in participants' stories of family language policy and planning. Additionally, I show that stories of becoming multilingual are also stories of lost language learning opportunities and that investment in language learning is closely linked to the notion of agency. In Chapter 6, I present a comparative analysis of multilingual students' ideologies of and attitudes to English in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. I show how multilingual students from Kazakhstan claim linguistic ownership of English by orienting toward state discourses of trilingual nation-branding, which is strikingly different from the narratives of students in a neighboring country, Uzbekistan, who project an opportunistic and insecure attitudes toward English. In Chapter 7, I demonstrate how transnational multilinguals blur the lines between nativeness and non-nativeness through scaling and (re)scaling their stories of language attitudes and language use in everyday life. I introduce discourses of habit as a new useful term in accounting for the unconscious aspects of these participants' discourses of daily language practices. In addition to describing the linguistic situation of understudied communities, this work informs a multilingual turn in applied linguistics by focusing on multilinguals in their home countries and those multilinguals who have moved abroad, as well as attending to multiple languages in participants' linguistics repertoires. Theoretically, this work demonstrates that identities should be studied within the spatiotemporal configurations of the contexts in which they are constructed and that an attention to (un)conscious habits of daily language use can challenge the native/non-native dichotomy. I also re-visit the concepts of linguistic ownership, nation-branding, and post-Soviet brain drain to re-conceptualize multilingual speakers' stories of becoming and being multilingual. With regard to applied implications, this research offers a number of instructional suggestions for the second and foreign language classrooms, in which knowledge of moral values held by students' families and a metalinguistic conversation around students' daily use of languages can be informative for curriculum design and for cultivating students' linguistic confidence. Finally, this study is timely in addressing the experiences of understudied and under-theorized multilingual communities toward developing a more holistic approach to the study of multilingualism and multilingual learners in Education.