The Language Teacher
August 2001
Interview with Dr. Kasper
Jim Goddard
July 17, 2000Jim G: For those who are not familiar with the field, how would you define the scope of sociolinguistics?
Dr. Kasper: Well, not so differently from what sociolinguists would usually answer. Sociolinguistics in its most general sense has to do with the relationship between language and society. So we would like to see how societal issues constrain language. By language here we can talk both about language as a system and language use. Language as a system would be things such as how are distinctions that are socially important in society encoded in the language. For example, in Japanese, clearly social distinctions in terms of status are extremely important and the inside/outside distinction is important. These distinctions are encoded in the Japanese language, in morphology of the language, and the speakers make choices accordingly. Even though all languages make such distinctions, not all languages have this same intricate system of grammatical encoding in the language system. Japanese is one of these languages, but of course not the only one. There are also Thai and Korean and many other languages that have similar encoding of social distinctions in their language system. All languages make distinctions according to language use and social practice. In any language, speakers would distinguish their social relationships, the situation in which they are talking, what they are talking about, and so forth. They make such distinctions clear through particular selections they make from the linguistic system, in language use. This is one of the very important things sociolinguistics looks at.
Sociolinguistics is also interested in language change. So far I mentioned that societal factors constrain language and language use, but the impact also works the other way around. In other words, the way that language is used also has an impact on social relationships, on social situations, and on social institutions, for example. It's not a one-way street. That would not be the correct way of looking at it. The really important point that I want to make here is that more recently, sociolinguists have been interested in the effect that language use itself has on society: on social institutions for example, social relationships and their maintenance and transformation, which are in many instances established via language. It's a dialectical relationship, really, between language and society.
G: Are there any issues in the field of sociolinguistics that you see as particularly "hot" right now?
K: That's really, extremely difficult to say because the field is so huge. Maybe I should just say a little bit about how huge the field is. Many sociolinguists, in analogy to a distinction in sociology, like to distinguish between micro and macro sociolinguistics.
And even though one cannot really make a clear-cut distinction in all cases, it still makes sense to look at the relationship between language and society in either in a much more macro or global perspective and issues that will typically be seen as macro sociolinguistic issues would be the distribution of languages or language varieties in multilingual societies.
For example, take the entire issue of societal multilingualism. Most countries these days in the world are multilingual rather than monolingual, so the issue of who speaks what language in what situations, how different languages are related to issues of power, and what the status of different languages are in a multilingual society are important macro sociolinguistic issues.
In connection to this, one issue that has become very important and will probably gain importance in the future is the issue of language planning. In any multilingual society, and by multi-lingual, I'm not just talking about different languages (however languages are defined, and that's not totally to be taken for granted), but also different varieties of a single language: For what purposes are these varieties used, in what situations, and what is the status of these varieties? All these issues are issues of language planning. One social domain where we are affected as language teaching professionals, affected from a language planning perspective, is in education. In Japan, for example, it is the ministry of education that decides what kinds of languages, how much of them and when they are taught in the public school system.
Typical micro sociolinguistic issues are such issues that look at the way language is used in specific social contexts. There is a whole range of different problems that have gained attention in recent years. For example, how do children acquire not only languages, but in the acquisition of a language also acquire cultural practices and cultural values? This is an issue that is known as language socialization. This issue has become very important recently, not only in respect to children as they acquire their first language, but also with respect to adults -- learners of foreign and second languages. Here, research interests focus on learners through interaction with expert speakers, whether inside or outside the classroom, and acquire not just the target language, but also knowledge of how things are done in the target culture or context.
There are all kinds of different, very interesting approaches that look at different social situations and the way in which language is used in interaction. That has become extremely important and is an issue has been addressed from a variety of different and generally compatible theoretical perspectives such as conversational analysis, interactional sociolinguistics, and ethnographic micrographic analysis. Different research issues, whose common dominator is a very fine grained analysis of what is going on in interaction, very often not only at the verbal level, but at the non-verbal level as well.
G: You mentioned language planning and how that is an issue in Japan, especially with the involvement of Monbusho. What other sociolinguistic issues do you see as particularly relevant in the context of the EFL environment in Japan?
K: Well, there are, of course, many issues. It's more a question of where to start. Perhaps I could focus on a few issues that I'm particularly interested in myself. One of the issues has to do with what would be a desirable "norm" or goal for English foreign language teaching in Japan. There has been a lot of discussion recently, and I know that my colleague Sandra McKay, who came to TUJ to give a seminar, also addressed the issue: how reasonable is it to posit a native speaker norm for English as a foreign language in Japan, or for that matter, in any foreign language situation? This is a very, very complex issue, but the first problem from a sociolinguistic perspective is so obvious: "What norm? Who's norm anyway? Who's English?" Well, of course not mine, because I'm not a native speaker, right? You are (a native speaker). Well what privileges you the right to choose which English (we teach)? Why not the next person's so-called native speaker variety of English? How about Indian English, which is also a native speaker variety? How about Scottish, that has a really nice sound. In a language which is as extremely diverse as English, there are so many varieties to choose from. This variation is true for any language, even Japanese. However, the issue of variety is especially important since so many people speak the language; there are native speakers, non-native speakers, and people who use English as a wider means of communication as an additional language. English as a language is used by so many speakers for so many purposes, that identifying a particular group of so-called native speakers as a "target" or "norm" is extremely questionable. It is questionable because the language is increasingly used by non-native speakers of the language as a lingua franca, or as a means of wider communication. In other words, it is highly likely that when Japanese people speak with Chinese or Thai people for example, they will use English as a means of communication. Clearly, it doesn't matter at all whether or not the English they learned was modelled on any way on a native speaker's English, because that's not what's necessary, or even useful for the use of English as an international language.
This is the first thing we have to recognize: English must be taught as an international language. A lot of research effort should be invested in finding out what this means for reasonable goals in teaching. The very first thing that comes to my mind, comprehensibility aside (and of course anybody using any kind of language should be comprehensible or it's defeating the purpose), is the whole issue of accent which I see as a non-issue. Everybody has an accent, right? I have an accent; you have an accent; everybody has an accent. Who says that native speaker accents are better in any way than non-native speaker accents because very clearly, when it comes to comprehensibility, native speaker accents which are non-standard accents for example, but perfectly native speaker, can be quite incomprehensible, so that's not useful. In other words, we should perhaps be a lot more lenient when it comes to the whole issue of accent and go for comprehensibility rather than trying to eliminate everybody's accent, because that's clearly futile anyway.
There is of course also quite a different research strand which supports such a position, and that is second language acquisition, because we know from second language acquisition that for adults or adolescents it's extremely difficult, if not impossible, to learn to speak a foreign or second language with any kind of native accent. They can make themselves perfectly comprehensible, but not speak with a native accent. There are all kinds of arguments coming from different research directions to say let's forget about the native speaker norm for pronunciation first of all, and settle for something that's comprehensible. Let's not worry about whether someone speaks with an American or British accent when once someone opens their mouth, it is clear that they are a non-native speaker anyway, so what's the point?
Language obviously doesn't just consist of pronunciation, but many other layers also. It is important here to have more research in order to determine what would be useful selections from what is available in the English language at the syntactic, at the lexical and at the pragmatic or sociolinguistic levels to include in the curriculum for Japanese learners of English. Ultimately, there's only one way to make such decisions in a rational way, and that's by a needs analysis. We need to know what are the situations and communicative purposes that students will learn a language for. There is no other way. In other words, there is no language internal set of criteria to determine the things that learners need to learn how to do. It all comes out of: "What are the communicative situations that learners have to or want to function in, and what do they want to learn?"
G: Do you have any other thoughts about how EFL teaching in Japan might (or should) change in the 21st century?
K: Well, there's the issue we have discussed already, which I know my colleague Sandra McKay discussed as well (at a recent visit to Japan); English as an international language, which is really, really important. In addition to that there still seems to be this contradiction between what is mandated by Monbusho (teaching for communication) and what actually happens at many schools. To me, it's quite interesting to see that in Korea, for example, the communicative shift did happen. They were much more successful than the Japanese educational establishment to change from a grammar-translation oriented way of conducting the EFL classes, to a communicative orientation. If this whole call for the new curriculum, which is a communicative oriented, is not just cosmetic, but there is content to it, then there are a number of requirements. The very first requirement is that the teachers have to be qualified to teach communicatively, which again requires two things. The first thing is that the teachers are communicatively competent, because one can't really teach in a more student-centered, communicative way if one doesn't have very good command of the language. I'm saying a very good speaker; it doesn't have to be a native speaker. Someone who doesn't need to be dependent on the book, just going through the book, because one can't teach communicatively like that. In addition to the teacher's own good L2 competence, they need to be trained English teachers. It's not enough to have studied English literature, for example. I love English literature and was an English literature major myself, but the study of literature does not qualify anybody to teach language. By the way, the study of linguistics doesn't qualify one to teach languages either. One has to know something about how second languages are learned and how people communicate in them, etc. in order to teach in a responsible way. By responsible I mean, in a way that really responds to the students needs in different kinds of situations. That responsibility is the teacher's responsibility, but they can only live up to this responsibility if they have adequate training. So that to me is one of the crucial elements in the change and improvement of language teaching in Japan.
G: What about the team teaching situation here in Japan?
K: Well, in Korea, they don't have that much team teaching, they apparently train the teachers. What I feel is particularly problematic is that there is this team situation where there is a division of labor where the Japanese teacher is responsible for the grammar, more metalinguistic aspects of language, and the native speaker for the speaking. This just reinforces the whole ideological stance that if you want to be a good speaker of the language, you have to be a native speaker of it. That's just terrible; just train the teachers.
G: In your article in TLT this month (June, 2000), I see that you were talking a bit about the challenges associated with introducing pragmatic awareness into the L2 classroom. Do you see any problems addressing sociolinguistic issues (such as language pragmatics) in the EFL environment here in Japan as opposed to an ESL environment?
K: Because of the technology, teaching communicatively in the sense that both sociolinguistics and pragmatics are brought into the classrooms is so much better these days. It was really difficult before electronic media and especially video were widely available, but I would think that these days there are many ways of compensating for the fact that students cannot just walk out of the classroom and be immersed in the target language. Observing and participating in the "real world," that's of course not really possible for EFL students. However, there are lots of ways to bring in relevant input into the teaching environment, for example by having students observe videotaped interactions that you want them to understand, and later participate in actively. They can not only read and hear, but see how language is used for different pragmatic purposes, or observe how sociolinguistic distinctions are made.
For example, English has the reputation of not being very polite. However, students can watch video and look at how people interact; the non-verbal cues, the gestures, and the way that people look at each other. I think they will see that people are polite (in English), are in fact polite, but they are polite in a different way then people are polite in Japan, which has to do with both cultural and linguistic differences.
G: Then the challenge would be enabling students to experience pragmatics use realistically, and one way is through the use of technology?
K: Exactly. There are so many exciting possibilities with the use of the Internet and email. Students can interact with students and classrooms from all over the world in a very real way. Email and projects from anywhere in the world: that's the real thing, not fake interaction. There are so many resources out there, including online journals that instruct how to use this technology in the classroom.
G: Thank you for your time.
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