Language Diversity in the Classroom - ymerleksi - home

38 Language Diversity in the Classroomparticipating or remaining silent vary greatly; the context the topic ofconversation, for example must be taken into account; and so on.4. There is something particularly ironic in using an unfamiliar Latin term in theAmerican academic context. This, after all, is a setting in which facility withany language but English is uncommon, in which work in any language butEnglish is essentially disregarded, and in which titles and references in anylanguage but English must be given in translation. This seems to be true, evenin circles where one might have expected a little flexibility. A few years ago, Ipublished a piece about bilingualism (Edwards, 1999a), in a special journalissue devoted to the topic. My final sentence suggested that socialpsychologicalinvestigations were a variety of historical study, that theirfindings were snapshots that should be retaken every now and then. My finalphrase was tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis, which I felt summed upthe matter very nicely, and which I also felt was a reasonably familiarobservation. In any event, it seemed to me that the interested reader forwhom it was not familiar could very easily discover its meaning, and mighteven enjoy being nudged into a little detective work; I know that I do, whenfaced with something unfamiliar. (I have just done a Google search: it turnedup almost 90,000 hits, of which the top two or three were quite satisfactory.)I had, however, to engage in prolonged correspondence with the journal’spublishers and copy-editors, who wanted me to add an English translation inparenthesis. After a certain amount of argy-bargy, I told them that that woulddefeat the purpose of the Latin version, and that I would rather drop the wholesentence. They then, to my great surprise, yielded the field, and the phraseappeared without English accompaniment. This was one of those small,unexpected victories that keep academic life so vibrant.I note, incidentally, that Waxmann Verlag, in Münster, have been publishinga journal called Tertium Comparationis: Journal for Comparative and MulticulturalEducation since 1995. The words before the colon are of courseredundant but no doubt, it is hoped that they are redolent too.5. Further phenomenological excursions became even less focused. Thus, Roseand Kaplan introduced us to the new field of ‘ethno-inquiry’. The world, theypoint out, consists of both people and things, ‘and it is the task of the ethnoinquirerto try to sort them out’ (Kaplan, 1982: 15). For his part, Rose (1982: 19)reveals that ‘wordly things are such critical matters that they may be given aname. They can be called mundanities’. For a critical statement on thisnonsense, see Edwards (1983b). ‘Ethno-inquiry’ has apparently disappeared,I am glad to say, but it remains an example of the bizarreries that continue toarise.6. Another recent reviewer of Chilton’s book on political discourse is HailongTian (2006). Could anyone well, anyone who isn’t a discourse analyst bybirth read his review, with its painful accounts of Enoch Powell’s famous‘rivers of blood’ speech and Bill Clinton’s 1999 announcement of air strikesagainst the Serbs, without shuddering at the lengthy but empty and jargonriddenrestatements of the obvious? And could anyone doubt that this is but areflection of wider noisome practice within the field?7. In his argument for a closer relationship between psychology and linguistics more specifically, between social psychology and discourse studies Robinson (1985: 136) makes the following observation: ‘Unfortunately, the