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I WOULD like to respond to the two main issues addressed by each of the authors, the notion of the near-native speaker and that of linguistic purism. I take each one in turn.
The interest of foreign language departments in having near-native speakers in faculty positions presents an interesting contradiction. On the one hand, they want someone with the linguistic, sociolinguistic, and pragmatic skills that can be acquired only if one has lived, and used the language, in the society whose national language it is--someone who knows well the cultural attitudes and mind-sets of members of that society. The presence of such a person in the department ensures up-to-date cultural authenticity and provides colleagues and students with the ultimate validity of purpose--that of teaching a foreign literature in an English-speaking environment. On the other hand, departments want someone who will blend into an American academic environment, who knows well the mentality of American undergraduates, and who is conversant with the current discourse, debates, and concerns of American literary scholars. The ideal near-native speaker then, one would think, is someone who is completely fluent in the language and fully integrated in American society: the heritage speaker with a PhD from an American university. But this is precisely the kind of near-native speaker that some departments explicitly do not want. Since literature faculty members are rarely asked to speak the language of lower-division language courses, which ideally require a 4+ on the ACTFL scale, but rather are required to speak the academic language of literary criticism, one wonders why departments don't just say instead that they want "someone with a good command of academic Spanish." The reason is to be found, as Carmen Tesser suggests, in the quasi-mythical, symbolic value attached to the native speaker as representative of a national history that lends him or her credibility and legitimacy. It is this mythical cultural value that accounts for what a recent New York Times article deplored as "the disproportionate number of learners of French in this country despite the fading significance of France and the French language" (Steinberg). The French language may have ceded to English its standing as the language of business and industry, but the French native speaker seems to be alive and well in the market of symbolic capital.
The near-native speaker requirement in job listings is symptomatic of three unresolved issues in the teaching of language, literature, and culture in foreign language departments. Because of the historically close ties between foreign language faculty members and the foreign countries they represent, the teaching of literature and culture in language departments has traditionally been associated with the national and sometimes even nationalistic policies of the nation-states of which they teach the standard national language and the standard canonical literature (Kramsch and Kramsch). The cultural point of reference for teaching the foreign language is still encompassed within the current national borders of the most powerful nation-states: France, not Quebec or Tahiti; Germany, not Switzerland or Austria. (The multicultural correctness imposed on textbook writers by publishers does not really change this age-old bias.) There has been a manifest intolerance of regional accents, dialects, and nonstandard varieties, as there has always been an academic bias toward written rather than oral or popular forms of literature and scholarship (unless these become the object of written academic inquiry).
The relation of American foreign language departments to the countries they represent is a selective, and even a select, one. For while the departments entertain close ties to the native intellectual elite of the nation-states, they are not as close to the foreign national or public organizations that promote those nation-states' languages and cultures to tourists, businesspeople, immigrants, and other nonnative speakers (e.g., Alliance Française, Goethe Institut, Cervantes Institut); the point of reference for teaching the foreign language is very much the highly educated upper-class culture of power. Hence the surprising lack of common interest between German or French cultural studies scholars who teach German or French culture to nonnative speakers in the United States, on the one hand, and German or French scholars who teach cultural studies to nonnative speakers in Europe, on the other. The partners of whom American scholars seek the company in Europe are scholars of German or French as a native language, not as a second language, even though the American scholars themselves teach German or French in the United States as a foreign language or literature.
The study of foreign cultures in foreign language departments is restricted to their achievements in the domain of the humanities and social sciences (literature, philosophy, history, sociology, political science). It does not include, say, German education, French architecture or urban planning, Italian engineering, Russian physics. The attempt to extend the study of foreign languages across the curriculum is a step to expand the notion of culture to other domains, but efforts in that direction have limited themselves so far to studying, say, French writings on architecture in an architecture class as architecture that happens to be written in French, not as a manifestation of French culture. Beyond foreign language departments, knowledge seems to be viewed as a culture-free universal.
These three complex relations between American foreign language departments and the national cultures they represent play a major role in the type of native-speaker myths they perpetuate.
The doubts about the validity of the concept of native speaker are very recent. In the days when literature or literacy was the foundational discipline of language teaching--that is, until World War II--the native speaker was not someone one would try to emulate. In fact, being a "mere" native speaker was looked down on by the educated foreigner, who felt much more competent to understand the native's language, literature, and culture than the person who lived it day to day, precisely because the foreigner had a precious outsider's perspective (Kramsch "Cultural"). It is the teaching of ESL within an assimilationist ideology that has canonized (or beatified) the native speaker around the world (Kramsch, "Privilege"; Rampton; Widdowson). But now that English has become an international language, the concept is losing its meaning. Is the native speaker from London, New York, Singapore, New Delhi, Hong Kong? Furthermore, there is an increasing number of foreign language learners in American classrooms for whom the second language, L2, is in fact an L3 or L4. So that when they pronounce German words and construct German sentences, who knows what they actually intend to mean? If "Peking" means something different from the Chinese Beijing, "Paris" something different from the French Paris; if the French Versailles evokes for a French person something other than "Versailles" for an American; if the word challenge that one frequently finds in ESL textbooks means something different for an American businessman, a Muslim woman, or a young Palestinian--then it is not the use of words that constructs identities but the concepts and the emotional charge associated with those words, as Eugene Eoyang states quite forcefully. It might be not the English words that the French resent in their language but the style of life that these words represent.
For example, the English word weekend, associated with a stretch of time encompassing Saturday and Sunday, includes in its symbolic value leisure, no school, time for shopping, traveling, or working on the house. If there was no such word in France when I grew up, it is because we had no use for it. We had school on Saturdays, so Saturday was just another weekday, and on Sundays we went to church and did homework. We had no need for the concept that went with le week-end, because we could not even imagine a reality that would have encompassed it. By adopting the word, the French adopted the concept and the reality that went with it, as they have done with le macadam, le parking, le smoking, le dancing, le marketing, le bifteck, and le handicap. But have they really adopted the Anglo-Saxon way of life? Have they not, rather, as Eoyang suggests, just added one more identity string to their European bow?
When I was in Vienna recently, I spotted three notices that all greeted the visitor to the city. One at the exit of the Stefansdom read: "Der Dom freut sich über Ihren Besuch" 'The cathedral is happy / thanks you for your visit.' Another, at the end of an exhibit of local artists, said: "Wir freuen uns, daß Sie gekommen sind" 'We are happy you came.' The third was on a poster along the road leading out of the city: "Wien ist happy, daß Sie gekommen sind" 'Vienna is happy that you came.' Three different expressions for happy, three different symbolic worlds: the venerable Vienna of ecclesiastical institutions and nominalized traditions, the young Vienna keen on establishing personal rapport and on fostering public relations, and the up-and-coming global Vienna that knows the value of English as a marketing device. (I was later told by my Austrian friends that the German word glücklich was reserved for deep metaphysical joy and that the English \hepi\ was used for the kind of superficial contentment associated with the pursuit of happiness.
The issue of linguistic identity addressed by Eugene Eoyang raises some interesting questions for the teaching of foreign languages. First, whether we want it or not, mental, emotional, and linguistic translation is going on all the time in language learning (see Kern). Immersion approaches have only pretended that this was not the case. Not only is such translation going on but it is not necessarily occurring between English and the foreign tongue. And the concepts that are evoked by the foreign words often do not have in our students' imaginations the same value at all as we think they do. For example, it is not because the Viennese have integrated the English word happy into their German vocabulary that their understanding of happiness is coextensive with ours. Discourse in late modernity can be a quote of a quote of a quote.
Second, reinstating translation once again as a legitimate pedagogic tool could make the notions of the native, near-native, and nonnative speaker irrelevant. Speakers of languages that are not their own might in fact not even desire to become native speakers, but rather might wish to capitalize fully on being in between and to make use of the multilingual reality of the language classroom (Blyth; Kramsch, "Privilege"; Kramsch and Lam).
Finally, focusing on literary writers who choose to write in a language that is not their native language (e.g., Jorge Semprun, Claude Esteban, Andrei Makine, Patrick Chamoiseau in French, Ze do Rock, Gino Chiellino, Feridan Zaimoglu in German) would be an opportunity to discuss the ideology associated with standard languages and their national warrants. Linguists are aware that standard languages are political constructs, promoted by governments, publishers, national institutions, and the media. Sociologists know that standard languages are the key to institutional power and to powerful gatekeeping mechanisms that exclude immigrants and other undesirable speakers (e.g., Bourdieu; Luke). As one of my Romanian students complained about the frequent lack of attention paid to grammar in communicative approaches to the teaching of German, she added, "At the border into Germany, if you have an American passport, you can afford to have sloppy grammar, but if you are Romanian like me, grammatical accuracy will be your only saving grace." Language teachers, bound by their very profession to the concept of the standard native speaker, rarely feel free to question whose national policies they are serving. Literature teachers, bound to the concept of the standard native reader, assume that American readers can understand foreign literary texts provided they "know their grammar and their vocabulary." Both are hostage to the myth of authenticity linked to a certain linguistic purism.
In this period of late modernity, it is appropriate that language studies teachers and scholars reconsider the political, cultural, and symbolic value of the native speaker and of its counterpart, the multilingual and multicultural go-between (Kramsch, "Privilege"), or, in Stephan Greenblatt's words, "the nomad speaker." To be sure, if only out of pedagogic responsibility, we must begin by teaching students some arbitrarily codified forms of the language, but they should be reminded right from the start that what they are learning is not a linguistic skeleton, invariant across contexts of use, but a living organism whose forms vary in shape, stress, place, and phonology according to where, when, and by whom they are used and for what purpose--that is, to inform, deceive, offend, hurt, or please. There is nothing wrong in teaching standard French, but students need to know how the standard is inflected by the myriad individual variable intentions of its speakers and writers and by the expectations of those speakers' and writers' culture. They should also know at what price standard French was obtained in the French Revolution (Certeau; Bell) and what role the Académie Française and French national educational policies have played in maintaining its purity. That, too, is culture.
The author is Professor of German and Foreign Language Acquisition at the University of California, Berkeley. This article is based on her presentation at the 1998 MLA convention in San Francisco, California.
Bell, David A. "Lingua Populi, Lingua Dei: Language, Religion, and the Origins of French Revolutionary Nationalism." American Historical Review Dec. 1995: 1403-37.
Blyth, Carl. "Redefining the Boundaries of Language Use: The Foreign Language Classroom as a Multilingual Speech Community." Redefining the Boundaries of Language Study. Ed. Claire Kramsch. Boston: Heinle, 1995. 145-84.
Bourdieu, Pierre. Language and Symbolic Power. Ed. and introd. John B. Thompson. Trans. Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1991.
Certeau, Michel de, with Dominique Julia and Jacques Revel. Une politique de la langue. La révolution française et les patois: L'enquête de Grégoire. Paris: Gallimard, 1975.
Greenblatt, Stephen. "Globalizing Literary Study." MLA Annual Convention. Fairmont Hotel, San Francisco. 28 Dec. 1998.
Kern, Richard G. "The Role of Mental Translation in Second Language Reading." Studies in Second Language Acquisition 16.4 (1994): 441-62.
Kramsch, Claire. "The Cultural Component of Language Teaching." Language, Culture, and Curriculum 8.2 (1995): 83-92.
------. "The Privilege of the Nonnative Speaker." PMLA 112 (1997): 359-69.
Kramsch, Claire, and Oliver Kramsch. "The Teaching of Literature in the Modern Language Journal, 1916-1998." Modern Language Journal, forthcoming.
Kramsch, Claire, and Eva Lam. "Textual Identities: The Importance of Being Non-Native." Voices and Visions: Non-Native Educators in ELT. Ed. George Braine. Mahwah: Erlbaum, 1998. 57-72.
Luke, Allan. "Genres of Power? Literacy Education and the Production of Capital." Literacy in Society. Ed. Geoffrey Williams and Ruqaiya Hasan. London: Longman, 1996. 377-88.
Rampton, Ben. "Displacing the 'Native Speaker': Expertise, Affiliation, and Inheritance." ELT Journal 44 (1990): 97-101.
Steinberg, Jacques. "Parlez-vous Français? But Why Bother?" New York Times 27 Dec. 1998, natl. ed.: A3.
Widdowson, Henry G. "The Ownership of English." TESOL Quarterly 29 (1994): 377-88.
© 1999 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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