31, no. 1 (Fall 1999): 19-19
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The Nonnative Speaker: Introduction
CAROL MAIER
"THE idealization of the native speaker has not been put into question," Claire Kramsch wrote in the May 1997 issue of PMLA, offering an implicit challenge to readers in departments of both English and foreign languages (359). Guadalupe Valdés discussed the closely related topic of the near-native speaker in her keynote address presented at ADFL Seminar West in 1997 and published in 1998. Clearly Kramsch had touched a nerve by asking that the "authority and prestige" enjoyed throughout the humanities by the native speaker be interrogated (359).
Various responses ensued informally in private conversations and departmental discussions. A larger, public forum was provided by "The Nonnative Speaker: Implications for Foreign Language Acquisition and Scholarship and Translation," a session sponsored by the MLA Advisory Committee on Foreign Languages and Literatures at the 1998 MLA convention in San Francisco. In sponsoring the session, the committee hoped to provide formal responses to the issues raised in Kramsch's article and to offer MLA members a chance to discuss those issues publicly. Committee members were concerned about the long-standing and highly influential fiction (Kramsch) or construct (Valdés) of the native speaker, which casts doubt on the qualifications of language speakers, not to mention language scholars and translators, born outside certain narrowly defined but widely applied national boundaries.
As the following essays demonstrate, both the remarks presented at the session by Carmen Tesser and Eugene Eoyang and Kramsch's response to them addressed the committee's concerns and referred to each of the areas in the session's title. And the audience responded in kind, exchanging both anecdotal and more general, theoretical comments. In particular, the exchange involved the role of translation in foreign language teaching, specifically the potential benefits of mental translation in second language reading and the possible implications of those benefits for other areas of second language acquisition (see Kern). Like nonnative teachers and scholars, translators not working into their "mother tongues" have been viewed as unauthentic. It was not, however, that link among foreign language professionals that gave such momentum to the discussion in San Francisco. Rather, it was the suggestion that teachers of foreign languages explore and tap "the mental, emotional, and linguistic translation apparently going on in language learning" (Kramsch, "Response to Carmen Tesser and Eugene Eoyang," below). If language learning involves by definition an apparently instinctive movement, albeit an unarticulated and even unconscious movement, back and forth between languages, making that movement explicit might be an important first step toward an interrogation of linguistic identity as conventionally defined.
The author is Professor of Spanish at Kent State University. She presided at a session at the 1998 MLA convention at which the three essays that follow were presented.
Kern, Richard G. "The Role of Mental Translation in Second Language Acquisition." Studies in Second Language Acquisition 16 (1994): 442-62.
Kramsch, Claire. "The Privilege of the Nonnative Speaker." PMLA 112 (1997): 359-69.
Valdés, Guadalupe. "The Construct of the Near-Native Speaker in the Foreign Language Profession: Perspectives on Ideologies about Language." ADFL Bulletin 29.3 (1993): 4-8. [Show Article] Rpt. in Profession 1998. New York: MLA, 1998. 151-60.
© 1999 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
