Neither Choking nor Mute: Negotiating Learners' Real-World Concerns While Teaching Real-World Communication

• In Event: 59. US Classrooms: Contested Arenas for Learning and Teaching Southeast Asian Languages. Sponsored by COTSEAL

Abstract

Learning a foreign language involves coming to terms with an often very different way of viewing the world, human relations, physical comportment, and social hierarchy. These differences can affect learners emotionally and cognitively at least as significantly as struggling to appropriate a new grammar or phonology. In the Southeast Asian language learning classroom, dissonances and conflicts inevitably emerge on the part of Western-born learners, whether non-native speakers or heritage students. Objections to the way that target-language native speakers view class, gender, and ethnicity are inevitable, and often result in resistance on the part of learners to ways that such attitudes and world views manifest themselves in word choice and social interactions. I describe some of these areas of conflict in the study of Khmer, and propose a way we can begin the complicated process of deciding when we need to “push” students to accept linguistic material which might run contrary to their beliefs and values, in order to ensure their ability to effectively communicate, and when we can- -and should--encourage learners to ‘stand their ground’ and reject racist, sexist, homophobic, and other ‘undesirable’ attitudes encoded in sociolinguistic norms. The question I pose is: how can language instructors reconcile the need for students to acquire linguistic material essential for social interaction in the target culture, even when undesirable to the learner, while allowing and encouraging learners to preserve their own value systems?

Author

• Frank J. Smith, University of California, Berkeley