[00:00:00] Bonni Stachowiak: Today on episode number 362 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast, Emma Trentman joins me to talk about language learning ideologies.

[00:00:13] Production Credit Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential.

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[00:00:23] Bonni: Welcome to this episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. I’m Bonni Stachowiak, and this is the space where we explore the art and science of being more effective at facilitating learning. We also share ways to improve our productivity approaches so we can have more peace in our lives and be even more present for our students.

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Emma Trentman is an associate professor of Arabic at the University of New Mexico. She is an applied linguist whose research focuses on language learning during study abroad, virtual exchange, and in the language classroom, with a focus on language ideologies and multilingual approaches. She is co-editor of Language Learning in Study Abroad: The Multilingual Turn, Multilingual Matters, 2021, and her research has appeared in various journals and edited collections, including The Modern Language Journal, Foreign Language Annals, and the L2 Journal study-abroad research and system.

She is co-editor of the Critical Multilingualism Studies journal, program director of the UNM Arabic STARTALK program, and teaches Arabic classes at the University of New Mexico. Emma, welcome to Teaching in Higher Ed.

[00:01:53] Emma Trentman: Thank you for having me. I’m excited to be here. I’m a big fan of the podcast.

[00:01:58] Bonni: Well, I want to start out with a word of thanks. I want to explain to people listening to this podcast that you were incredibly gracious and incredibly generous, and I want to talk a little bit, as I continue to introduce you a little bit, of how we came to be connected in the way that we are today. That is that I aired an episode and, as people who’ve been listening for a while know, at the end of it, we have our recommendations segment.

I spoke about in that recommendations segment, that I have a family member where Alzheimer’s does run in our family, a family member who had started to use an app called Duolingo as a form of brain training. I didn’t use that word in the episode, but that’s certainly would have been implied in what it was that I shared. I also shared that I had a sense about learning languages that I had failed.

I don’t have a lot of regrets in life. Again, I’m not sure how specific I got at the time because that episode was a while ago but just about that it felt like I would have to go live somewhere. That was something that I thought we’d have to live, be fully immersed in a language, otherwise, even just learning the language– Even though I was trying to fix my thinking on it, I knew that my thinking wasn’t right, because it’s like if you learned a little bit of a language, wouldn’t that be a good thing?

Anyway, all this to say you sent the most gracious email and what I can recall that you talked about in there, what I really took away was that you’ve been listening to Teaching in Higher Ed for a while, you feel like you know my values, and that my values were not matching up in both how I shared that story but also some of the beliefs that probably underpinned my sharing of that story.

You educated me with one email and then I thought, “Oh gosh, how would you feel about coming onTeaching in Higher Ed and sharing it with more of the community so that more of us could become educated?” I’m so happy you’re here, and I’d love to have you share a little bit about how you took in that part of the episode what you recall about why you wanted to reach out, what I might have left out, or what I might have gotten wrong about us initially communicating that way.

[00:04:20] Emma: I wrote in, and it’s funny because right after that, I was listening to another podcast that’s totally unrelated that also recommended Duolingo, and I thought that was why I ended up writing a blog post about it. To be clear, my issue is not with that app specifically. I don’t think people need to stop using it, and it’s not a question of it being worse than any other language learning app or language classes.

Those just tend to be less recommended on podcasts that I listen to. Essentially, I am an applied linguist, and I research language learning, particularly during study abroad, which is often imagined as that wonderful immersion experience. It’s sold in language classes as the pinnacle of your language study. You get to go abroad, and you’re going to be completely immersed in this language. As a study-abroad researcher, we know from looking at the research over and over again that this simply isn’t true.

Study abroad is a multilingual experience, and when we continue to frame it as an experience of monolingual immersion, it often sets students up for disappointment because they’re expecting monolingual immersion, and it’s a multilingual reality. Even more importantly, this idea of having monolingual immersion is rooted in these language ideologies that originated with European nationalism and the idea of having a nation-state where the linguistic and the political and the geographic and the ethnic borders were all mutually reinforcing.

This is an idea that’s been critiqued a lot, obviously, and it was also exported worldwide through colonialism where not only was it used to categorize other parts of the world but also to show that Europeans were superior. While today I don’t think most people thinking of study abroad as monolingual immersion are trying to prove European superiority, that really is the root of some of these language ideologies and also these ideologies of study abroad.

That was why I wrote because I knew that you wouldn’t want to be promoting that type of perspective on the world. I think this is very common. You’re not the only person who does this. As I mentioned, I wrote to someone else who was also talking about Duolingo on a podcast, and this is why I started my blog post series, Language Ideologies in the Wild, because this is so common in nearly every book I read that has nothing to do necessarily with study abroad or language learning or anything like that, just these conceptions of language.

I can talk a little bit more about the brain-training conception to that related ideology that basically sees language as a decontextualized object that sits in our brain. We can use it like logic puzzles or any of these games to train our brain. Of course, language learning does involve the brain, as all learning does. The problematic aspects of this particular language ideology, this ideology of decontextualization is that when you take language out of its social context and it’s decontextualized, then you lose sight of how that language is connected to its social context.

Because our language is so reflective of our lived experiences, this is when you can get to things such as language as a proxy for various types of discrimination, racism, classism, and so on. This is partially because when you decontextualize language, then you can standardize language, and this is the ideology of standardization. Then we lose sight of whose language is considered the standard.

Then that connects back to these nation-state ideologies, where, of course, the people whose language is considered standard and this ties back to the nation-state ideology of language in the sense that what’s considered the standard language of a nation-state is the language of the socially dominant group. Of course, this excludes a lot of people who speak different varieties of these languages or different languages, and this has been something that’s been highly critiqued.

Those are how those tie together in terms of the immersion. I co-edited a book with Wenhao Diao, the Language Learning in Study Abroad: The Multilingual Turn, where all of the authors in their chapters really looked at this idea of monolingual immersion as a myth and how learners navigate the multilingual realities of study abroad in a variety of ways. I think it’s more helpful to think about how we can work on navigating multilingual realities than trying to always get this monolingual immersion.

[00:09:22] Bonni: I am just fascinated by all of this. I want to circle back to the study abroad because I think it’s healthy for me to admit that I was a little bit afraid of today’s conversation because I feel a little bit– This is just really a stretch for me, you know what I mean? The study abroad, so much of everything you said, I thought, “Oh gosh.” I never experienced study abroad, but I had so many friends who did, and I saw so much of their stories in what you said.

What could you tell us then might make the expectations for what study abroad could do better? Am I trying to fix the wrong thing? If we’re going to try to lessen some of these factors, what might study abroad look like? Does it even still exist? If we lessen it, does it stop existing in any recognizable form?

[00:10:19] Emma: I think this is what I say about language cheating, too. In a lot of ways, it’s just reframing our perceptions of what is already happening in study abroad or in the language classroom. The way I like to describe it is to say, rather than focusing on what language we’re using and is this good or bad, focusing on how we’re using language, in particular social contexts.

This comes from translingual language ideologies, which are presented as an alternative to these monolingual language ideologies. Again, the thing to remember with ideologies, this is sometimes perceived as a very negative term, but there is no neutral stance, we can’t be free of language ideologies, but I think we just want to be more aware of the ones we have and their origins and their repercussions in terms of language learning and study abroad.

These translingual language ideologies, many of them developed as advocacy for marginalized social groups, many of whom are multilingual, and basically looking at how you can’t examine a– and this … Garcia and her colleagues, which I can share with you in the show notes, but essentially saying that if you’re looking at a child’s knowledge in an academic subject and you don’t give them access to their full linguistic repertoire, so you make them do it in only one part of their repertoire, this part of the repertoire we call English, or even alternatively, this part of the repertoire that we call some other language, you’re not really accessing that child’s full knowledge because you’re constructing it to one part of their linguistic repertoire.

They advocate for translanguaging practices, which are when we recognize the full linguistic repertoires of learners and don’t restrict them. We really draw from our full linguistic repertoire is to learn not only content knowledge but also language. That’s where my research intersects with this because I work on study abroad. Generally, I am working with very socially privileged populations, but in terms of language learning, it’s a similar thing.

Going back to the question of, “What can we do about study abroad?” if we reframe it from, “Am I using the local language and that’s good because I’m learning it?” or “Am I using English and that’s bad because it’s my language, and I’m not going to learn the local one?” rather if we reframe it to look at, “How can I draw from my full linguistic repertoire to expand it in this particular direction?” that’s a much more interesting question to me.

Then it also avoids some of these more problematic language ideologies that were ultimately used to create nationalism and colonial projects. Of course, the consequences of those are very real today. I think that’s how I like to think of reframing it. Oftentimes, we can just look at this same situation and think of it differently if we look at– and this is what I found in my own chapter in this book and then in some of the other research that I’ve done.

Students would have these conversations, which I had recorded as part of my research, in which they were conversing with a taxi driver, and they were translanguaging, drawing from their full linguistic repertoire, both the taxi driver and the student. They might do that with a taxi driver, they might do that with a friend, but they would report on these conversations from a monolingual perspective, saying, “I spoke Arabic with a taxi driver, and I spoke English and my friend.”

If you listen to the conversation, it’s much more nuanced and rich than that, so again, getting away from this perspective of which language in the translanguaging literature they refer to these as named languages because these are socially named, rather than just inherently there and really looking at how learners are using their full linguistic repertoires to learn and how they’re interacting with other people local to the context perhaps or in other international students, and everyone is drawing from their full linguistic repertoire.

In another project, I had a student who was … in Egypt, came from a university in the United States, and then she had grown up in Thailand. She was using Thai with friends in Egypt and using this to meet new people. That’s just one example. There are many, many of these, again, taking that multilingual perspective as the norm, which is the norm for most places in the world, including even within the United States, which we tend to think of as highly monolingual.

[00:15:12] Bonni: So much of what you’re saying is reminding me of all the discussions around interdisciplinary thinking that when our kids were very young, in preschool and kindergarten, they did an exceptionally good job of not saying, “Now we’re doing math, now we’re doing reading,” [laughs] but just interacting with their environment, and one of the big things that their school was an outdoor classroom.

There’s all kinds of disciplines that can come in, even just observing what’s happening there in that outdoor classroom and the butterflies. Of course, I can count them, and I can look at some of the science into how and why butterflies, all of that. I don’t know if that comparison is fair here in the sense of being able to speak of our language and ways of communicating in ways that aren’t so compartmental. Is that a fair comparison to make here?

[00:16:04] Emma: Yes. I think that makes sense as a comparison because, again, categorization is an extremely useful tool, obviously. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t use our skills in that area, but I think just in the same way that language use has been categorized historically to make language judgments that are really proxies for things like supremacy, patriarchy, and so on, I think that we could take a similar lens to the formation of many of our disciplines.

These are actually related, particularly if we look at disciplines like linguistics, or anthropology, or education. In the same way that we want to be aware of how our disciplines came to be categorized and who these processes excluded, we can do the same with how our language use came to be categorized into these different languages and who’s excluded in these processes as well. I think they’re parallel processes because, ultimately, these come from larger socio-historical processes that shape all sorts of aspects of our lives.

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[00:17:19] Bonni: I wanted to circle back to something else that you said earlier in our conversation because I didn’t want to just pass it by, I am confident that I was aware that these apps are not great brain training.

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I’ve seen that enough to know that although also, I want to be respectful of a family member who has that fear that it’s not like it’s going to hurt, it’s not going to cause Alzheimer’s if it’s not useful in preventing it, that kind of thing. So much of what I was thinking at the time are then the opportunities that we have to connect with one another, to share those shared experiences.

That was more of what I was thinking at the time, but I would love you to share anything that you have just in case anyone else is under that impression, that these apps are good brain training because that’s not my understanding. [laughs] That’s not.

[00:18:19] Emma: In terms of, are good for brain training, I don’t really know, my concern is more the idea of conceptualizing language learning as something you do in an app to train your brain. They might be good, they might not be in terms of the very specific types of things you’re talking about. One thing that I think is interesting when we talk about language learning and aging and these types of things, actually, I have a blog post on this, too, because they came up in another book, as I said, all these language ideologies in the wild.

It was about a woman who started learning Spanish in middle age, and because of this framework of language learning as a cognitive tool, the author put this in a chapter on brain training, and it’s right there with other types of things you could do to train your brain, yet this woman’s story was all about the experiences she had interacting five days a week with groups of Spanish-speaking friends.

There was a whole another chapter in this book on social contacts as being really important when aging. Again, I think what you talked about, using this app as a tool to connect to the family member independent of whether it succeeds in cognitive development or not, that I think is the key point to keep in mind is that we use language, whatever type of language, in context because we want to interact with people or even if we think of something like reading, it’s still an interaction with thoughts and ideas and all these types of things.

I think it’s more that when people talk about language as brain training, I’m not so concerned with whether or not it actually does cognitive things in your brain, I am more concerned with the perception that language learning is something that happens in your brain separate from the social context. The concern there is that, again, this goes back to this ideology of decontextualization, which was used to standardize certain socially dominant forms of languages. I think it really obscures all of the amazing ways that we use language when we draw from our full linguistic repertoires to do all kinds of other social things.

[00:20:44] Bonni: Before we get to the recommendation segment, I wanted to explore that with you just a little bit more. I thought so much after your initial email and then you followed it up with your blog post, too. I thought so much because I kept chuckling at myself in terms of using the app. It has you say things like, “I am a boy, I am a man, I eat grapes.” If you could just talk a little bit more about how language learning could look different if we didn’t have to remove ourselves from the context if that could be a part of our learning process versus just having this separate world that is separate and apart from the social interactions in that context.

[00:21:30] Emma: Yes, I think one of the great things about our world now is we have things like YouTube, which you can open, and you can find all kinds of things in many different languages and varieties of these languages. Again, if you’re at the level of, “I am a woman,” “I am a boy,” maybe not everything is easy to understand but just the social information you can get from that.

Of course, that is in the context where perhaps you don’t have interactions with people who speak this language that you’re learning. I think also, just recognizing that “Why would we choose to learn a language, to listen to people who speak in that language?” Again, even in the United States, which we think of as highly monolingual, there are speakers of all of these languages, not just the larger ones that we might think of, like Spanish.

I live in Albuquerque, people tend to think of Spanish, I teach Arabic. There’s many, many Arabic speakers in Albuquerque even if this isn’t what we think of. Just making connections with people who speak the language so that we can listen to their stories and their perspectives and all of these types of things I think is really important. It doesn’t mean that we have to be what people often call completely fluent.

That’s another thing I talked about with you. If we draw from our full linguistic repertoires and engage in translanguaging practices, we can use these to really understand different stories and perspectives. On social media, too, I think this is something that– I think I wrote about it in my Duolingo post because they have this little thing about spending 15 minutes on Duolingo versus social media, but if you spend it on social media in the language you’re trying to learn, it’s such a great way to learn different perspectives from people who speak different languages and varieties.

Again, it’s not that if you use Duolingo or any other language learning app or language learning class, it’s a bad thing, it’s just that it should only be part of your learning repertoire. Maybe we can go back to the original analogy of the linguistic repertoire.

[00:23:51] Bonni: Before Emma and I get to the recommendations segment, I wanted to take a moment and thank today’s sponsor for the podcast. Today’s podcast is sponsored by the 37th Distance Teaching and Learning DT&L Conference, being held August 2nd through the 5th, 2021. This is promising to be a super engaging, fun, and fully virtual event. It’s going to help us see what’s next from the best of the best in distance education.

We are also expected to feel renewed and invigorated when we connect with the world-renowned experts and be able to add new skills, tools, and techniques to our DE toolbox. I keep saying “we,” by the way, because, in exchange for this sponsorship, I get to have myself and a colleague attend. I’m really looking forward to learning from thought leaders like Maha Bali, who’s the creator of Equity Unbound, Sian Bayne, and Jeremy Knox, who are the authors of The Manifesto for Teaching Online, and so many more.

If you’d like to participate in the conference or learn more about it, you can find out that information at dtlconference.wisc.edu. That link will also be in the show notes for today’s episode, and I look forward to seeing some of you there. Thanks again to the DT&L Conference and for sponsoring today’s episode. This is the time in the show where we each get to make our recommendations, and I wanted to suggest that people read the post that we keep talking about: the post about Language Ideologies in the Wild.

There’ll be a link to that in the show notes. I, also, just would encourage people to browse your blog and what great resources are there if people are interested in this topic and in learning more. I am now going to pass it over to you for your recommendations.

[00:25:47] Emma: Oh, thank you so much, and thank you so much for having me. As I mentioned, I really enjoy the podcast and everything teaching and learning in higher ed. I was actually going to recommend some other podcasts and a YouTube channel related to this topic because I thought listeners to this podcast might like other podcasts. There’s a podcast called The Vocal Fries, by Carrie Gillon and Megan Figueroa, that focuses on issues of linguistic discrimination. That’s a great one.

Also, Unstandardized English, by JPB Gerald and that focuses on whiteness and language teaching and has really expanded into epistemology and other things. That’s a great podcast. Finally, there’s a YouTube channel, by Mike Mena, called The Social Life of Language. He takes academic articles and makes videos on them that are very accessible. I love using this in class, so I would highly recommend his YouTube channel as well.

It has videos about a lot of the topics that we’ve discussed, that are great not only for ourselves but also for our students. In fact, I’ve had students tell me that they liked the videos so much that they started watching videos that I didn’t actually assign in class. [laughs] I think that is the measure of success.

[00:27:11] Bonni: Always, such a good sign when that happens. That sounds like a wonderful set of resources. Emma, I just want to thank you again for your generosity and helping me be able to think through some of my ideologies and exposing me to this whole world that is less familiar to me. Thank you for that and now sharing that with this broader community, I’m really excited to have had this conversation and to, through all the materials you published, getting to continue to learn from you, thank you so much.

[00:27:37] Emma: Oh, thank you so much for your generosity in having me on the podcast and just producing the podcast generally, I think it’s a wonderful resource.

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[00:27:49] Bonni: As I close out today’s episode, I wanted to just take one more chance to thank Emma Trentman for joining me for today’s episode, number 362, Language Learning Ideologies. If you’d like to check out the show notes, they are most likely already in your podcast app, you can swipe over to them in most cases or you can head on over to teachinginhighered.com/362.

If you’d like to get the show notes in your inbox every week along with some quotable words, other recommendations from me, you can subscribe to the weekly Teaching in Higher Ed update at teachinginhighered.com/subscribe. Thanks, once again, for listening to today’s episode, and I’ll see you next time.

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The transcript of this episode has been made possible through a financial contribution by the Association of College and University Educators (ACUE). ACUE is on a mission to ensure student success through quality instruction. In partnership with institutions of higher education nationwide, ACUE supports and credentials faculty members in the use of evidence-based teaching practices that drive student engagement, retention, and learning. 

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