Day 5: ALAA conference. Do you want some neoliberalism with that?

Why bother learning a second (or third, or fourth) language when “everyone speaks English anyway”? Really fabulous plenary lecture from Ema Ushioda on the first day of the Applied Linguistics conference about motivation and the multilingual mind.

So historically, research on motivation - why do language learners learn languages? - has focused on the instrumental value of learning a second language. That is, it has asked what learners stand to gain by learning a language, in terms of business and educational opportunities, and so on. From this point of view, language learners are assumed to be striving towards native-like proficiency, and in never quite reaching native-like proficiency, are always at a deficit.

What if, asks Ushioda, this way of thinking about language learning motivation is constrained by English language globalisation and neoliberal ideologies?

(I mean dayum.)

And in any case what does it mean to have “native-like” proficiency in English? Whose English? English has long been an international language, belonging to everyone and no-one, and target language norms are a problematic frame of reference.

What if, instead, we ask questions about language learning motivation from what Ushioda calls a 'holistic, constitutive' view - one in which languages are “an essential element of human being’s thought processes, perceptions, and self-expressions”, where speakers have multiple competencies in multiple languages that are neither inferior nor defective but simply different?

When we view language learners holistically as multilingual communicators, we’re not trying to prescribe where second language learners “should be”; we’re describing how second language learners are.

Pedagogically, when language learners are allowed to have multilingual competencies, they can stop 'progressing' (read: struggling) towards some monolingual idea of proficiency, and start expanding and diversifying their linguistic and communicative abilities.



The implications of what Ushioda laid down today for learning endangered and minority languages are manifold. There’s been some talk for a while that ‘instrumentative motivation’ isn’t a very useful concept in situations where there are limited economic or educational opportunities associated with learning a minority language; and when a language with no speakers left is being reclaimed from books and old recordings, it’s difficult to see how you would compare a language learner’s proficiency with some ‘target’ proficiency. So we need a different framework, a different point of view, to research motivation for learning minority and endangered languages in a way that allows us to say something meaningful about why people learn languages, and I think this multilingual mindset is vital.