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A COUPLE of months ago I attended a discussion on the topic “Maintaining Faculty Language Mastery”—a title that led to some discomfort among the participants. The word maintaining seemed problematic to us. Was the issue not a question of developing and enhancing rather than merely maintaining in a static way our proficiency level? I was more concerned, however, about the use of the word mastery. The obvious gendered connotation of the word apart, its usage by nonlinguists is vague. Linguists are concerned about mastery as gradable and believe that there are degrees of knowing. Consequently, the notion of mastery is cognitive in nature (Ellis 348). This perception of a gradual mastery on an interlanguage continuum is, however, missing in the lay person’s understanding of the word (Selinker). Comments like “As a nonnative, one can never truly master the language” or “You have near native proficiency, but you can’t aspire to mastery of the language” suggest that the word is usually equated with absolute superiority and command, lending it an authority that seems to remain indisputably the prerogative of the native speaker. Admittedly, these are anecdotal comments, but they are important inasmuch as they color an understanding of my authority in the foreign language classroom. “Authoritative language relies [. . .] on a highly developed control of the linguistic image” (Colvin 85). It is this image of a native speaker as master of a language that I wish to deconstruct. A questioning of such an apparent congruence between mastery and native speaker proficiency would not only lead to a greater recognition of nonnatives as teachers, but also allow an unimpaired development of their different strengths as cultural mediators in foreign language classrooms.
A lot of thought and discussion has been devoted to the role of the foreign language learner. But the question I pose in the title of my paper, “Whose Identity?,” addresses the positioning of native and nonnative teachers as polar opposites and the increasingly visible role of the nonnative teacher as cultural mediator in the acquisition of a linguistic system. Many teachers are becoming more concerned with preparing students for a pluralist, multiracial society. The language classroom is expected to contribute a global perspective to such endeavors. Such a contribution allows our students in the language classroom to confront another culture’s ethnic and racial stereotypes and to recognize that ethnicity and race are historically determined social constructs.
It would be useful to define at the outset the term native and the various historically specific changes it has undergone over the last few centuries. Back in the era of European colonialism-imperialism, especially during the nineteenth century, the word native definitely carried a negative connotation (native = not civilized, barbaric). Success from the colonizer’s point of view dictated that natives be tolerated if they served the cause of the colonizer or be punished or eliminated if their behavior became transgressive, as implied in the expression “the natives are getting restless.” “Going native” signified the ultimate corruption of the colonizers, their assimilations into the exotic, threatening body of the other. All this was accompanied by a carefully cultivated belief in the innate inferiority of the colonized peoples. The inferiority of the native other had to be naturalized if the colonial enterprise was to succeed. After all, as the German philosopher Hegel stated in 1824:
The English have shown themselves to be the people most capable of ruling over [India . . .]. The English, or rather the East India Company, are the masters of the land; for it is the necessary fate of the Asian empires to be subjugated by the Europeans, and China will also have to submit to this fate at some point. (216; my trans., my emphasis)
Hence no native knowledge—cultural and linguistic—could carry any weight except as a means to penetrate the consciousness of the native in order to devise better strategies of subjugation.
When colonialism came to an official end in many countries in the last century, there emerged a new urgency and insistence on native speaker proficiency for acquiring forbidden or hidden knowledge about the other, especially within the context of the cold war. Language learners from the first world had to acquire near native proficiency to infiltrate enemy lines, so to speak. One had to create clones indistinguishable from the native other, who was still regarded as different and of course dangerous. This attitude was similar to that of Lawrence of Arabia in the early twentieth century, a man who could pass himself off as an Arab. As the culture critic Edward Said points out, “What matters to Lawrence is that as a white expert, the legatee of years of academic and popular wisdom about the Orient, he is able to subordinate his style of being to theirs, thereafter to assume the role of Oriental prophet giving shape to a new Orient” (243). It is this ability to penetrate the native consciousness that characterized the attempt to gain native speaker proficiency during the cold war.
With the end of the cold war, the term native seems to have undergone a shift, although it was still framed within a Western epistemology. The native speaker ranks at the top of proficiency scales, and for a nonnative, near native proficiency is perhaps the ultimate goal. The German missionary Hermann Gundert (the German writer Hermann Hesse’s maternal grandfather) provided an interesting analogous situation when he had to compare native and nonnative levels of moral rectitude. Gundert was enthusiastic about converting the natives to Christianity but was not quite convinced that conversion meant membership with equal rights in the Christian community. When recommending that Jacob Ram, a native, be ordained to priesthood, Gundert inserted the following proviso: “I recommend that his salary be increased at the rate of Rs 5 every four years starting with Rs 25. [. . .M]ore money does not seem warranted, for such a raise does not increase the Hindu’s efficiency. He would be tempted to leisure and maintenance of his respectability” (218). Similarly, there is the implicit belief that the nonnative will never quite achieve the same level of proficiency as the native. It is precisely this belief that I challenge.
In second language acquisition and foreign language education, the dichotomous presentation of the terms native and nonnative is problematic. The native teacher becomes the authentic transmitter of culture. Nonnative instructors, however, especially those whose skin color makes them immediately visible as nonnatives, are constantly forced to maintain their professional credibility with colleagues and students. Learners view with skepticism, if not outright hostility, the identity of such an instructor as a transmitter of the L2 culture. As a South Asian woman, I have encountered these misgivings not only on the first day of every German class that I have ever taught but also when introducing myself to colleagues. In other words, I do not meet their preconceived notion of a teacher of German.
The Turkish writer Zehra Cirak, who lives and writes in Germany, has coined the word verschubladisieren for such unproductive attempts to label (the closest translation might be pigeonholing). I suggest that the concept of authenticity, of an authentic cultural identity, is a precarious one because of its political nature. One strategy I use to defuse such situations is that I enter the classroom, walk up to the chalkboard, and write my name on it—in Telugu. When the students look baffled, I apologize, go back to the board, and write my name again, this time in Hindi. The first hesitant smiles appear on the students’ faces. When I then write my name in English, I sense the class relax. They have accepted me for the most part, particularly on the level of general linguistic competence, if not expertise, even if it is not yet transparently German.
If the concept of authenticity, as I suggest above, is inherently political, it would be interesting to ask oneself at what point cultural identity becomes politicized. There are circumstances that favor such politicization more than others, as for example, when religious doctrines are questioned, during colonialism-imperialism, and when new states are formed. Any one of these conditions provides a way for interpreting cultural grievances and becomes the means for molding and mobilizing public sentiment. The third condition is especially relevant for me as a nonnative teacher of German. For example, in Germany, cultural identity became politically crucial in the process of nation building, and the Reichs- und Staatsbürgergesetz of 1913 (the Imperial and Citizenship Law) codified the relevance of such an identity by specifying that German citizenship be passed by descent from parent to child, excluding anyone who was not biologically “German.” Germany’s limiting form of national identity and the citizenship laws based on ethnic exclusion largely explain the continuing perception of German society as homogeneous and the violence against so-called foreigners. Such codification is important, I believe, in establishing the meaning of native and nonnative.
It is crucial to comprehend the political expediency that lies behind the understanding of the word native and the resultant, necessary slippages in its definition. During colonial times, the self-interest of the colonizer dictated that the natives—the original inhabitants of the colonized land—be perceived as degenerate, diseased, irresponsible, and immoral. This perception was, after all, consistent with the colonial agenda.
Has this definition of the two terms native and nonnative remained unchanged? Or have they perhaps switched places now? I believe that they have become more multi-layered entities, less transparent. On the surface, it would indeed seem as if native was used consistently as a positive designation of the superior linguistic skills and cultural knowledge that a native speaker has acquired. However, if a particular culture has little or no intrinsic value but has to become knowable only for reasons of economic or political practicality (as in colonial times), then the representative of that culture is correspondingly devalued. Consequently, there is a two-tiered understanding of native that one needs to contest: the native speaker of a hegemonic language such as English or French, and the native speaker of a language whose value corresponds, interestingly enough, to the arbitrary designation “third world.” It is this ambivalence that permits slippages in the understanding of the word native. Such slippages allow for a perpetuation of a colonialism that is, as I have argued above, not readily visible and hence more difficult to identify and resist.
One example of such linguistic colonialism can be seen in the tension that exists between English with a capital E and the various englishes spoken around the world, especially in former British colonies, a tension that is predicated on the perception that white English speakers determine what kind of English is acceptable and appropriate. For example, white speakers from the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand are privileged as speakers of English in its capitalized, singular form.
The physical separation of metropolis from colony that signaled the postcolonial era did not necessarily obliterate a consciousness that owed as much to colonialism as it did to struggles for independence and a search for a coherent and cohesive identity. English was one of my first languages. It is an integral part of my history. I have resigned myself, however, to the invariable question “Your English is quite good! Where did you learn it?” that instantly trivializes my multilingual childhood.
Jorge Suárez, of Uruguay, points out in his interesting essay “Native and Non-native: Not Only a Question of Terminology,” “Passions run high when an issue involves questions of personal and cultural identity, vocation, status, equal rights and opportunities, jobs and salaries.” The power that lies behind the ability to name cannot be denied. I have to ask the question, Who determines the identity of a nonnative? The paradoxical nature of my role within the English-speaking world has allowed me to exploit the ambivalence and ambiguity of such a role, enabling me to raise awareness of the power structures inherent in language.
The increasing multiculturalism in Germany is forcing Germans to revise their understanding of national differences, thus highlighting the social diversity and cultural pluralism that exist within one and the same nation, within one and the same foreign language classroom due to differences in ethnicity, social class, and gender (Taylor).
When I began teaching German at the Goethe Institut in Pune, India, I accepted the distinction made between native and nonnative as reasonable and appropriate. I was painfully aware of what I perceived as my low level of proficiency in the German language and culture and looked forward to visiting Germany and being able to approximate the native speaker. It was much later that I realized that such native speaker proficiency was not necessary for teaching a foreign language effectively. Małgorzata Szwaj’s comment in “The Paradox of a Non-native EFL Teacher” expresses succinctly what I mean by “effectively”: “The question of how close we can get to the reality of another culture in order to feel a part of its language and society is also a question of how much we want to learn about ourselves from this encounter” (my emphasis). To our students, as to us as nonnative teachers of a foreign language, this element of self-discovery is vital. Recent debates about German studies in the United States have begun questioning the usefulness of trying to emulate that mythical creature known as the native speaker. Such native speaker proficiency implies the existence of a self-contained homogeneous cultural space. However, the understanding of German culture needs to be framed within the context of German studies in the United States. We cannot assume that our students are learning German in an attempt to become German.
I am not trying to journey into the realm of the competence of a mythical creature called a native speaker. It is my belief that the various paradoxes that surround nonnative teachers of a language strengthen rather than impair their abilities to teach language effectively. One such paradox has to do with the belief that a nonnative teacher is a learner for life. As Szwaj remarks, “[I]t is a must for a non-native teacher who has to juggle two roles and identities at the same time—that of a learner and that of a teacher—traditionally associated with authority and setting the standards of competence.” But does this kind of juggling not lie at the very foundation of all teaching? When one gives up the role of learner, one is doomed to stagnation. The dialectical tension between learning and teaching is what makes teaching so stimulating. To pretend that the native teacher is a finished product who has nothing more to learn is a comforting illusion, but one to which I am unwilling to subscribe. The knowledge that I bring to bear on the foreign language classroom is different from, but as valuable as, that of my native speaker colleague.
One of the major ways in which culture manifests itself is through language. As Claire Kramsch suggests, “Language plays a crucial role not only in the construction of culture, but in the emergence of cultural change” (3). The importance of the nonnative teacher is located at this junction. As someone who straddles the fence between at least two cultures as a specular border intellectual (JanMohammed and Lloyd), the nonnative instructor can teach people from other cultures how to use somebody else’s linguistic code in somebody else’s cultural context and can bring about social change. Such productive interaction between two cultural communities, mediated by the nonnative teacher, sensitizes each of these communities to the other’s potential, revealing the infinitely layered nature of diversity.
Language has been taught as a fixed system of formal structures and universal speech functions and as a top-down transmission of cultural knowledge, with culture being incorporated only to the extent that it reinforces and enriches. We do not question traditional boundaries of native and nonnative, self and other. What we need, however, is to teach language as a body of cultural knowledge.
As I mention above in the context of postcolonial englishes, historical relations of power and authority enable and empower certain ways of speaking. This is where the nonnative teacher’s role as cultural mediator can be most effective in changing such a hegemonic structure. The tension and conflict that arise from a collision of cultures need no longer be perceived as unproductive. On the contrary, they encourage a dialogue that leads to greater understanding. Different assumptions and expectations can bring about unforeseen changes in one’s thought processes and weltanschauung. Nonnative teachers are better able to mediate among two or more cultures because they are more aware of the contentious nature of such dialogues, situating themselves in a space between or outside these cultures—a third space. (The culture critic Homi Bhabha understands this third space as a space “that does not simply revise or invert the dualities, but revalues the ideological bases of division and difference” [58].) If such a third space challenges the formation of identity as a coherent and cohesive endeavor, the confrontation can only result in a healthy tension that forces a pause and a reconsideration of using language on the other’s terms. Such tension can be extremely productive in the language classroom. Nonnative teachers teach a foreign language that is not their own and that they have not helped shape. But they are functioning in social contexts that they can now help define by resisting and challenging assumptions and expectations. What can be more satisfying or powerful than mediating in the interest of social change?
What impact does such a perception of the nonnative language teacher have on the foreign language department and the institution? I suggest that the more we encourage the nonnative teacher in her or his role as cultural mediator in the foreign language classroom, the more we counter the increasing globalization of identities as a process of homogenization and assimilation, constructing identity rather as an endeavor to recognize the multiple flowing selves that each person possesses.
A nonnative teacher who is constantly contesting rigid notions of identity in other cultures can also help students view emotionally charged issues from a historical and cultural distance. The students can discover for themselves the kaleidoscopic nature of diversity in a natural and nonthreatening environment. A department that regards the contributions of the native and nonnative instructor as coequal is more likely to succeed with a mode of instruction that casts doubt on a singular notion of identity and encourages multiple perspectives.
Colvin, Sarah. The Rhetorical Feminine. New York: Oxford UP, 1999.
Ellis, Rod. The Study of Second Language Acquisition. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1994.
Gundert, Hermann. Schriften und Berichte aus Malabar mit Meditationen und Studien. Stuttgart: Steinkopf, 1983.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm. Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1961.
JanMohammed, Abdul, and David Lloyd. “Toward a Theory of Minority Discourse.” Introduction. The Nature and Context of Minority Discourse. Ed. JanMohammed and Lloyd. Spec. issue of Cultural Critique 6 (1987): 8.
Kramsch, Claire. “The Cultural Component of Language Teaching.” Zeitschrift für Interkulturellen Fremdsprachenunterricht 1.2 (1996): 1–13. 26 Apr. 2002 http://www.ualberta.ca/~german/ejournal/archive/kramsch2.htm.
Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Random, 1979.
Selinker, L. “Interlanguage.” International Review of Applied Linguistics 10 (1972): 209–31.
Suárez, Jorge. “‘Native’ and ‘Non-native’: Not Only a Question of Terminology.” Humanising Language Teaching 2.6 (2000). 22 Apr. 2002 http://www.hltmag.co.uk/nov00.
Szwaj, Małgorzata. “The Paradox of a Non-native EFL Teacher.” Humanising Language Teaching 1.8 (1999). 22 Apr. 2002. http://www.hltmag.co.uk/dec99.
Taylor, Charles. Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992.
© 2002 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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