Evaluation of the languages in the Master

Now that I have finished the Master (Learning and Communication in Multilingual and Multicultural Contexts), and the experience has already started greying out in my mind, it seems like the right time - or the last possible time at least - to write a blog post I had been intending to write, evaluating how I experienced it. Particularly I would like to evaluate some of the practical elements of how the multilingualism so proudly announced in the Master's name and on its website, actually plays out in and around the classroom and the student residences.

Entrance requirements
The Master is trilingual in English, French and German, and when I applied it was specified that you have to have C1 level English and B2 in at least one of the other two languages. Classes are taught in one or more of the three languages, and most of the staff is at least bilingual as well. It was also stated, however, that the degree is not a language learning course, although it included some language classes in the programme.

One of the first points to make here is about those specific language requirements. Because of the way English proficiency is obligatory, but aside from that you can choose either French or German, English is already effectively the lingua franca before the course has even started; through this requirement it is assured that English will be the language everyone has in common.

Teaching multilingually
The way that the classes worked is they were mostly taught in two out of the three languages, usually either French and English or German and English. There were also some ambitious teachers who taught in all three. I think the teachers were explicitly encouraged to make their classes multilingual. The actual balance between the languages differed per class, depending mainly on the teacher's choice of strategy but also on the students' input.

There were for instance teachers who tried switching between the languages while lecturing (the ones really dedicated to the multilingual ideal); teachers who mostly lectured in english but who presented case studies in other languages, with or without paraphrase; and teachers who mostly taught in French or in German but who might occasionally switch to English to accommodate student questions. Often the first class of a course would be more multilingual than the last one, as the teacher realises some of the students cannot follow the class well because their German or French comprehension skills are lacking, or because the students keep asking questions and discussing in English, so that the teacher starts to accommodate. That said I also had classes where students would make a genuine effort to make contributions in the class language, sometimes going so far as to speak it amongst ourselves. I had a few classmates and friends with whom I'd speak German, even though it was neither of our first language - I'm thinking of girls from Romania, Slovakia and China respectively (hi!).

I generally tried to pick classes in all three of the languages every semester, so choosing classes not just based on what I found most interesting, but also making sure I'd have at least a bit of French input. My French comprehension really isn't at an academic level though, as I found out while sitting through lecture after lecture in fast French. I eventually zone out, however hard I am trying to pay attention. If I do my best I will get a sense of what the teacher is saying, but I can't follow the specifics unless they talk slowly and give me some time to let it sink in or look up some words after every line. Powerpoints can help, but they can be distracting too, as you are trying to translate the info on the slides while also trying to follow what the teacher is saying. Somehow, with some teamwork and some bluffing, I did manage to get alright grades for these classes, but I haven't retained very much of what they were actually talking about.

The course as a language learning environment
That brings me onto the next topic, namely that the course wasn't intended to be a language learning course, but rather a multilingual way to deliver a humanities research course. The experience of multilingualism was part of the experience the course directors aimed for us to have, but greater fluency wasn't one of the outcomes on which students were evaluated. Yet almost everyone who chose to do the course, did so hoping to improve their language skills. At the start of the course, some intensive language classes were offered at beginner and intermediate level. I took French intermediate, so my 3rd language of the three course languages. I think people generally chose to do these courses in the course language that they were weakest in. The course I did was fun and it helped me to figure out some French past tenses and the like. In two weeks you are not going to reach fluency and I don't think that was the hope of the course designers. I know that some other students got quite annoyed with their beginner language courses, either because they found German too hard or because they didn't get along with the teacher. The intensive language courses were fairly separate from the rest of the degree and were not explicitly followed up on in the rest of the courses, which might be a tip, to integrate them more through e.g. reflection on how much you can learn in this way, which methods seemed to be most productive and so on.
 
The way the assignments worked is you were allowed to write them in any of the languages that the teacher felt confident marking in - so normally the stated course languages, but I suppose if you had another language in common with the teacher you could write it in that. (I never tried this but I seem to recall that the Luxembourgish students wrote something in Luxembourgish.)

Now, writing an assignment for university is hard in any language. Mostly every sentence costs a lot of thought and effort. You need to make sure your argument makes perfect sense, your explanations are well-written and sensible, your sources are quoted in relevant ways. But there is a lot of time pressure and you're also working on a few other assignments. Little surprise, then, that students do not venture to write in languages that they aren't very confident in. My German is at a fairly high level - I used to talk to my boss in German, I can maintain a long and nuanced conversation, albeit with some wrong inflections, I know words like ausbilden and eintrichteren and I know you can call money Mäuse. But academic writing is absolutely a skill apart. The teachers are aware that it is, and the course does offer classes in academic writing in French, German and English. I took the German one and enjoyed it, but it was a bit intimidating that I was doing the same assignments as the native speakers who were in the class with me (why they didn't take the French class instead is beyond me).

I think that the course could have developed its facilities for the students to develop their languages more, importantly by explicitly rewarding students for writing an assignment in another language. I suggested this to the course coordinators and they felt it would be hard to enforce this - as it would mean differentiating between a German native speaker writing in German, and a Greek person writing in German; or even between a Greek person who has lived in Germany before and a Greek person who hasn't; the implementation would be either quite subjective, or very complicated.

Dissertation methodology

Picture by Frank Bohbot taken from ignant.de


I've started the work for the dissertation I'm going to be doing all year. I'm still in the blissful first stages: swimming around a bit and reading very broadly, all I can get my hands on. In the past two weeks I made good acquaintance with an introduction to sociolinguistics by Mesthrie et al. and now I have moved on to a stack of books on the methods and assumptions of critical discourse analysis (less fun to read, not as many cartoons).

The research question as of yet is: which linguistic analysis methods are useful in the study of language policy and planning?

This is different from what I had thought of initially. At first I wanted to research the impact of language policy and planning (LPP) on internal language change. This was my abstract:

Language planning and policy are a well-researched area of study, but the focus is strongly on the political side of things; how can we ascertain that people have the right to use their language for administrative purposes? In which language should education be provided in multilingual countries? The purely linguistic aspect of language policy has been given less attention. The question this dissertation will attempt to answer is what influence language policy has on internal change of the affected languages, thereby tying in to a bigger question of what factors trigger language change.  

In this dissertation I will first make a classification of types of language policies based on actual policy decisions with regards to language planning and regulation. For each type of policy I will investigate how this might affect internal language development and provide examples from languages affected by these policies. The conclusion will reflect on how these findings relate to the bigger debate on language change in general.

The feedback I got for my first proposal suggested that the chapter "Linguistic Analyses in Language Policies" by Ruth Wodak was a good start for such a dissertation. That chapter didn't mention my proposed idea at all though, but instead seemed to suggest that the only feasible method of linguistic analysis in LPP is critical analysis of texts proposing language policies. Hence I now feel that I ought to try this method also.

To criticise my own idea that you can evaluate language policies by analysing the way they impact on the languages they police; it goes against the principle of sign arbitrariness of De Saussure. The language is not better or worse at signifying meaning before or after a change, no matter whether that change be onset by a policy of some kind. However there are some social aspects - e.g. language attitudes and economic benefit - that do get better or worse as language policy changes.

Another assumption underlying my original proposal that I now don't agree with is that you can draw a clear line between linguistics and sociology or politics. There are more and less "social" approaches to studying language and LPP but they blur into each other and overlap very much. Moreover I implicitly made the assumption that this distinction is meaningful and important. It serves to delineate the number of topics that need to be discussed in a degree on any of the subject fields, but that does not mean that it is a good reflection of reality.

What I feel I have to do now is try out a set of different methods and approaches, preferably on and to the same case study. The choice will focus on the more "linguistic" type of investigation as that would be what I can get the most assistance with within the School of English. The purpose to my mind is to get an idea of the relative benefits and helpfulness of each of the methods and the type of information that can be acquired via them. I still want to look at language change and variation, but I also want to critically analyse texts surrounding my case study, and perhaps I can investigate language attitudes as well.

The book I've started reading at the minute is "Methods of Text and Discourse Analysis" by Titscher et al. I found it hard to read at first but then I employed the tried and trusted "line per paragraph" summarising strategy. Then I got into the flow and stopped summarising as it was a bit tedious, but by now (a few hours later) I have forgotten what the bit that I didn't take notes for said. The main point they have made so far is that all research methods are, implicitly or explicitly, related to particular theoretical assumptions. They then went on to set out a four-step research design decision procedure. The first step is to decide what the research is for; finding explanations, testing hypotheses or describing. The researcher then needs to decide how involved they have to be with the source of research data, how critical they want to be of predetermined categories, and whether they want to do a snapshot or track changes. More on this later.