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Have you ever thought about how the word “sick” expanded its meaning from “ill” or “unhealthy” to also mean “excellent” or “impressive”? Some may ascribe it to the transmission of language from one generation to the next, as agents in new generations are constantly exposed to novel ideas and experiences driving neologisms to voice their thoughts and mark their identities. Others might attribute this to semantic change, more precisely amelioration—a process where a word with an unpleasant meaning comes to have a positive or a neutral meaning. From where I stand, I view it as “language dynamism." It is a complex process that gives birth to a comprehensible product. It is an intelligible input that necessitates a communicative output. It is a means that leads to an end—communication. As we play “the language game” and interact in social contexts, we change the rules of the language, the rules that are anything but imposed or constant. We “language.” From theory to practice, this section highlights the major principles upon which my LTS artifacts are grounded.
Dynamic System Theory and Language Complexity
Dynamic System Theory (DST) in SLA (de Bot et al., 2007) depicts the complexity of interconnectedness. The theory is nested in the idea that every simple system is in interplay with another one, which births complex patterns. Metaphorically, one can visualize it as the sub-molecular particles that are interconnected to form the universe or the complex pattern of the flock that emerges from the interactions among the individual birds.
From the lens of the DST approach, communication is viewed as a "dance," a metaphor that Shankar and King (2002) use and refer to as “interactional synchrony." The dance metaphor captures the agency and active participation of agents, viewing linguistic creativity as an outcome and a property of agents’ linguistic behaviors in co-regulated interactions. Sykes et al. (2020) argue that clear expression and accurate interpretation are hallmarks of effective communication. In this realm, assessment of complex language abilities used in successful social interactions could be approached in terms of knowledge, analysis, subjectivity, and awareness—such aspects that are recently grounded in the IPIC model (Sykes et al., 2020).
In my LT 538 artifact—The Power of Requests—I applied the IPIC model to a lesson plan on the pragmatic function of requests in English. The lesson plan encourages the agents to analyze, choose, and mitigate their language choices with respect to the context, which augments communicative success in areas such as intercultural communicative competence (ICC) (i.e., the ability to successfully interact with people of other cultures or subcultures) (Sykes et al., 2020). This iterative process indulges agents in authentic usage-based learning, which Larsen-Freeman (2007) argues can lead to patterned complexity and creativity. Learners are guided to discover the culture of conversation and make educated comparisons of the differences and similarities between the Arabic and English cultures. Additionally, the lesson plan includes a section of research on the teachability of pragmatics in general and requests in particular, informing educators of the various insights and tips on designing a pragmatics plan.
LT538.pdfLT 538 Artifact: The Power of Requests
Iceberg Model of Culture
Complexifying Context and Culture
Just as you cannot separate the dancer from the dance, we cannot argue for separating language learning from context. The dance metaphor illustrates the interplay between cognitive, social, and environmental factors that give rise to communicative behaviors. Therefore, context—in its spatial and temporal sense—is not viewed as an external, static variable but as a dynamic, multifaced constituent of the individual and their experiences in meaning-making. Learners, thus, are influenced by context and consequently contribute to shaping and changing the context as time progresses (McDaniel et al., 2014).
Stretching from the micro-level, inter-individual, and interactional interactions to the macro-level, intra-individual cultures, context accounts for and refers to all contextual factors that impact or constitute interactions. Thus, context includes culture, which refers to national societies, and sub-cultures, which conceptualize social communities, individual classes, online communities, and subject domains. Similar to context, culture is neither static nor fixed. Hall (1959) states that “culture hides much more than it reveals, and strangely enough, what it hides, it hides most effectively from its own participants” (p. 53). To reveal the invisible components of culture, the iceberg model of culture—a metaphor developed by Hall in 1976—is used as an analogy to depict the surface and hidden culture, what we term big C culture and small C culture.
My LT 536 artifact stands as a lesson plan to teach arranged marriages in Arabic for students at a 300-university-level program. Looking closely at the iceberg, one notices that marriage surfs on top of the iceberg, symbolizing a part of Big C culture. However, values and norms regarding marriage lurk in the shadows. Though arousing controversial issues in the classroom can be worrisome, it must be acknowledged that such issues are not absent from the world in which learners are immersed. Thus, to address them, learners need to be equipped with the language to do so. In this artifact, the social issue of child marriage is highlighted and discussed within the plan, which reflects the culture, patterns of behaviors, and attitudes of the people. Language learners are encouraged to analyze and respond to the language input, impacting the content and proposing solutions that further develop the context of interaction.
Lesson Plan 2 Scenario 2Amira .pdfLT 536 Artifact: Lesson Plan
Investigating Dichotomies and Ideologies in Language Teaching and Learning: It is Not My English Day!
“POV: You forget a word in your L2 that you could not recall in your L1, so you turn from a bilingual to a byelingual.” A meme depicting “the chaos” (Freeman, 2006) in bilinguals’ minds invaded social media platforms, depicting a first-hand experience that I, among many others, can attest to. Although an increasing awareness of multilingualism and plurilingualism is given to investigations of language choices, code-switching, code-mixing, and language dominance fluctuation, the emergent competence of bilinguals remains attested to a monolingual ideology promoting dichotomies of native-speakerism. An adequate amount of research on bilingualism is based on two main views. The first view encapsulates bilinguals as the sum of two monolinguals, representing distinctive and separate linguistic repertoires that are fully developed. Consequently, bilingual proficiency is measured against what Larsen-Freeman (2006) describes as “conformity to uniformity” of homogeneous target language norms. The second view depicts a hierarchal relationship between L1 and L2, viewing a bilingual as someone who has a dominant language (L1) and a partial competence in L2 and L3, etc. Thus, power is attributed to the language, not to the speaker, perpetuating a sense of linguistic inferiority among bilinguals compared to their monolingual counterparts in the target language.
My second LT 536 artifact—Decolonization of Language Education: Voices of Emergent Change— highlights the imperialist ideology in the context of English language teaching and learning in the Arab world. Furthermore, I recall my experience as a Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistant of Arabic and pinpoint the colonial context of Arabic teaching and learning in the United States. The paper calls against the commodification of languages, arguing that language learning has turned from a pathway to cultural transmission and global citizenship to a lottery ticket to social, economic, and political mobility in the neo-liberal world. “It is always easier to point out problems than solve them,” one may say. In an attempt to positively and actively approach the colonial scene of language teaching, I proposed a theoretical approach to pedagogical decolonization that focuses on material adaptation, applying it consciously in my lesson plans and material design. Furthermore, the artifact highlights a more humanitarian approach to decolonization through classroom discourse and embracing multilingual behaviors.
Decolonisation of Language Education.pdfLT 536 Artifact: Decolonization of Language Education
Transidentity .pdfLING 544 Artifact: The Role of Translanguaging in the Formation and Transition of Identity
Adding to the point of multilingualism in the classroom, it is important to point out that classrooms are an important—often neglected—space of identity formation and negotiation as they encapsulate a considerable part of the invisible spaces where cultures and subcultures interact through interactional discourse. The classroom setting embeds various modes of meaning-making and knowledge-construction that may perpetuate monolingual, colonial ideologies.
My artifact from LING 544—The Role of Translanguaging in the Formation and Transition of Identity—opposes the labeling and categorization of languages, arguing that it dispossesses languages from their ultimate goal: socialization. To break free from the restrictive nature of monolingualism in multilingual classrooms, the artifact highlights the role of translanguaging as a theory and a pedagogical framework that acknowledges the use of the learners’ unitary linguistic repertoire without regard to the policing conformity to social and political boundaries that control language naming and usage. Furthermore, in this artifact, I attempt to discuss the intersection between language, cultural duality, and identity formation and transformation, leading to an understanding of translanguaging as a multilingual practice and a pedagogical framework that ensures social justice in language classrooms.
References
De Bot, K., Lowie, W., & Verspoor, M. (2007). A dynamic systems theory approach to second language acquisition. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 10(01), 7. https://doi.org/10.1017/s1366728906002732
Hall, E. (1959). The silent language. New York: Doubleday.
Larsen-Freeman, D. (2006). The emergence of complexity, fluency, and accuracy in the oral and written production of five Chinese learners of English. Applied Linguistics, 27(4), 590–619. https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/aml029
Larsen- Freeman, D. (2007). On the complementarity of Chaos/complexity theory and dynamic systems theory in understanding the second language acquisition process. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 10(01), 35. https://doi.org/10.1017/s136672890600277x
McDaniel, E., Samovar, L., & Porter, R. (2014). Using intercultural communication: The building blocks. In E. McDaniel, E. Samovar, & R. Porter (Eds.) Intercultural communication: A reader (14th ed., pp. 4–18). Boston: Wadsworth.
Shanker, S. G., & King, B. J. (2002). The emergence of a new paradigm in Ape Language Research. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 25(5), 605–620. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0140525x02000110
Sykes, J. M., Malone, M. M., Forrest, L., & Sağdıç, A. (2020). Affordances of digital simulations to measure communicative success. Encyclopedia of Educational Innovation, 1–5. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-2262-4_90-2
Image Attributions
Cover Image by Mao Batista
The Iceberg Model of Culture: self-designed illustration via Canva
Personal Considerations
The cover image depicts a vibrant marketplace in Egypt. The colorful stalls with fresh produce reflect my views of the dynamism of language. Offering a diversity of goods, the marketplace is a complex system with numerous interconnected parts, similar to the intricate structure of language, which displays exhibiting a wide range of dialects, accents, registers, and contextual factors. It is also important to note that both the marketplace and language are subject to constant change and evolution. As new products emerge in the market, new words and expressions find their way to the language.
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