Language Diversity in the Classroom - ymerleksi - home

244 Language Diversity in the Classroomshould bilingualism occupy its own niche in the larger linguistic,psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic enterprise?It is true, of course, that second-language acquisition cannot, inprinciple, be a precise replica of first-language learning, for the simplereason of being second. Heraclitus told us a long time ago that you can’tstep into the same river twice. The point I wish to make here, however, isthat the technicalities of the broad linguistic enterprise vital andinteresting as they are cannot, themselves, fully explain the depth ofinterest in multilingual accommodations. To understand them more fully,we have to move beyond language itself, beyond psycholinguistics,beyond experimental studies and educational programs that illuminateand facilitate repertoire expansion. We have to go beyond instrumentalmatters altogether, and consider issues of psychology and sociology, ofsymbol and subjectivity. In a word, we must think about the relationshipbetween language and identity, and how it may alter when more thanone variety is involved.Speaking a particular language means belonging to a particular speechcommunity and this implies that part of the social context in which one’sindividual personality is embedded, and which supplies some of the rawmaterials for that personality, will be linguistic. Since disentangling thelinguistic features from all others is hardly an easy task, it has alwaysbeen difficult to make a compelling case that membership in a givenspeech community has in isolation, as it were, from other socializingthreads concretely specifiable consequences for personality. But someintriguing questions present themselves nonetheless.Much of interest rests upon the degree to which bilinguals possesseither two (theoretically) separately identifiable systems of language from each of which they can draw, as circumstances warrant or somemore intertwined linguistic and, perhaps, cognitive duality. There is a‘popular’ (and sometimes scholarly) notion that bilingual individualsmust have a sort of split mentality: two persons in one, as it were.Grosjean (1982) and others have certainly reported that bilingualsthemselves sometimes feel that language choice draws out, and drawsupon, different personalities. But, as Baker and Jones (1998) and Hamersand Blanc (2000) tell us, the evidence here is anecdotal at best. Indeed, wecould go a bit further and point to the large logical and rationaldifficulties that some two-in-one arrangement would create. But, in a‘weaker’ sense, as it were, there are certainly indications that languagechoice may implicate different aspects of the personality. Bilingualsresponding to interviews and questionnaires are liable to give slightlydifferent pictures of themselves, depending upon the language used.