Graduating on the Installment Plan

Japan requires English study as part of their compulsory education curriculum and regularly “imports” native speakers from all over the world to assist in classroom instruction. Many of these teachers (I count myself among this number) are not trained linguists or educators by trade and soon discover that teaching a second language involves a good deal more than grammar and vocabulary; there are some serious shifts in cognitive processes and cultural practices that accompany L-2 language acquisition. As a result, a lot of instructors (and students!) are frustrated by attempts to recreate “standard” grammatical constructions. I’m not so sure it need be this way.

A couple of years ago, a very clever English teacher working in Japan decided to scrub the text from some Penny Arcade comics and allow his students to fill them in as part of an in-class activity (the blog posting can be found here; strongly encourage you to click through it!). This exercise and the resulting comics are an interesting example of Lo Bianco’s argument that globalization is crafting a multilingual milieu in which “personal bilingualism and societal multilingualism are the inevitable and insistent consequences.” The cartoons that the Japanese students produced are ludic illustrations of L-2 learners’ struggle to express their culture in a linguistic environment that is foreign to them as well as evidence of global English communicated through visual media (see New London Group).

Taking into account Lippi-Green’s assertion that language change is a linguistic fact of life, the sometimes non-standard constructions that the Japanese students employ when writing in English may be viewed as adding to the language rather than detracting from “standard” grammatical convention. In fact, it seems likely that Lippi-Green would recognize that, although in many of the examples the constructions used mark the writers as non-native speakers of American English, the efficacy of many messages are unaffected. Put another way, these exercises demonstrate the subjective qualities of language efficacy that are not fastened as neatly to standard syntactic rules as some proponents of mono-lingual pedagogies would have us believe. Students’ attempts at humor and narrative are easily decipherable and not a factor of such prescriptive rules as article usage or standard punctuation.

As Lippi-Green states, the “variety of language spoken cannot predict the effectiveness of the message,” and some constructions are more apt in some varieties than others. The instructor who designed the exercise that resulted in these comics praised his students for “their attempts at humor, their intentional non-sequiturs, and their offbeat cultural references,” all components of the language that were enriched by the students’ L-2 status.

Citation:

Goviolet. (2010, January 23). Penny Arcade Remix Project. Message posted to http://goviolet.com/?page_id=633