Welcome to the July/August issue of TLT Interviews! In this issue, we feature an interview with JALT2024 plenary speaker, Dr. Andy Curtis (Ph. D). Dr. Curtis started his professional life as a clinical biochemist in hospitals in the U.K. However, having found his real passions—teaching, learning, languages, and cultures—he moved from health care to science education to language education, making his path highly unusual and risky. However, such a pathway enabled him to bring together diverse fields of inquiry that had not been previously connected, and he has been recognized as the founder of the new peace linguistics. From 2015 to 2016, he served as the 50th president of the TESOL International Association, and in 2016, he received one of the association’s 50-at-50 Awards, when he was voted one of the fifty most influential figures in the field, over the first 50 years of the association. Over the last 30 or more years, Dr. Curtis has (co)authored and (co)edited over 200 articles, book chapters, and books; presented to 50,000 language educators in 100 countries, in Europe, Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and the North, South and Central Americas; and his writings have been read by 100,000 language educators in 150 countries. He is currently serving as a Distinguished Guest Professor in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the City University of Macau (SAR, PRC) and is cross-appointed to a number of universities in Mainland China. His most recent book is Bad Language: Decoding Donald Trump (2024b). He was interviewed via written correspondence by Torrin Shimono, who has taught Japanese learners of all age groups for nearly two decades. He currently is an Associate Professor at Kindai University in the Faculty of Law. He received his doctorate from Temple University. His research interests include reading fluency, reaction times, phonology, self-efficacy, and testing. Without further ado, to the interview!
Torrin Shimono: I really appreciate you, Dr. Curtis, for taking the time to do an interview again for TLT Interviews! My co-editor, James Nobis, and I really enjoyed the interview you did for us in 2021 with your former Anaheim University TESOL graduate student, Aviva Ueno, and your plenary speech at JALT2024. Thank you. To get started, please let me tell you a little bit more about myself. I am from Seattle but have been teaching in Japan for the last 18 plus years. I am of Japanese and Chinese descent, but I heard that my first name has Nordic origins meaning “Thor,” and my middle name, Robert, is plain vanilla, but my parents thought it might be a good backup name if Torrin sounded too unique. Actually, my grandparents were put into the Japanese American internment camps during World War II and consequently gave their children (my father and his generation) very Caucasian sounding names so they wouldn’t get bullied at school. So, I could definitely understand the strategic value of the decision you made to change your name to get more job interviews as you said in your plenary. Also, as an American who looks like a Japanese person teaching English in Japan, I quite enjoy the look on students’ faces when I introduce myself in the first class exclusively in English, and sometimes I feel one of my roles as an English language teacher is to create that “cognitive dissonance” that you mentioned in your talk—perhaps to challenge their notions based on stereotypes and open their minds that there is a diverse array of English speakers out there!
Dr. Andy Curtis: Thank you, Torrin, to you and to James, for your positive feedback on my presentations at JALT2024 last November, and for inviting me to do this written interview with you. You have posed many important, large, and complex questions that deserve thoughtful and thorough replies, so the interview is longer than it might otherwise have been. Something else that also makes this interview different is that I have included in-text citations to published work, mine and others, with reference details given at the end of the interview. That is because my position on a number of issues has been described as “unconventional” and even “controversial,” so citing supporting work can help to explain those positions. Also, although interviews like this are usually opinion-type pieces, I tell my students that they are welcome to hold whatever opinions they choose—but if they want anyone else to pay attention to their opinions, then they need to be clear and explain on what those opinions are based. The last thing our deeply divided world needs right now is any more uninformed but highly opinionated people who cannot explain the basis of their opinions. Thirdly, I included sources, citations, and quotations (almost all of which are hyperlinked) because some of the questions below ask about things that many people have very strong feelings about, such as the outcome of the 2024 U.S. presidential election, in which case public opinions on such matters need to be especially well-supported. Lastly, references to my work are included in case any of the TLT readers are interested in knowing more about my work over the last 30 plus years.
For those who could not attend JALT2024, could you summarize the main takeaways of your joint opening plenary presentation with Dr. Liying Cheng?
For our joint opening plenary presentation, the JALT2024 Conference Committee asked Liying and I to reflect on our professional and personal journeys—individually and together—as “visible minorities” (Curtis, Effiong, & Romney, 2023) in relation to one of the main conference themes of diversity. We acknowledged that the metaphor and analogy of “the journey” has been so well used, in different languages, over many centuries, that it may be considered by some to be something of a cliché. Nevertheless, we believe that, for international language educators like ourselves and our JALT audience, using “the journey” as a framing device for reflecting on our personal and professional experiences makes good sense and is entirely appropriate. One of the main points we hope our audience took away with them, and which we hope stayed with them as they attended different conference sessions, is that diversity is difficult. In our field of TESOL/foreign language education, we can get so wrapped up in the importance, the benefits, and the virtues of diversity, we forget just how much easier things can be when everyone in the room looks and sound similar, and/or when everyone comes from similar socioeconomic and educational backgrounds. Sameness is easy. Diversity is hard (Curtis, 2020).
Great point. Could you briefly discuss what you think are some of the biggest difficulties for diversity and how we can best troubleshoot them?
There are so many challenges and difficulties when translating the theories of diversity into truly diverse practices, many of which are more political than practical. The most dramatic and most recent example of political resistance to DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) initiatives on a scale and scope that we have not seen before comes from the current president of the U.S.A. and his administration. On the 20th of January this year, a written announcement was published on the U.S. government website (The White House, 2025) titled, Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing. Leaving aside the meaningless overuse of words like “radical” by the Trump government, the first part of this “Presidential Action” announcement stated that, “The Biden Administration forced illegal and immoral discrimination programs, going by the name ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ (DEI), into virtually all aspects of the Federal Government, in areas ranging from airline safety to the military” (para. 2). For now—but perhaps not for long—there is no more powerful military, economic, and political force in the world today than the U.S.A. Therefore, when announcements like the one above are made, other world leaders, governments, and far-right groups believe they can follow suit and do the same.
Addressing DEI positions such as those held by the current U.S. government will take many years, but one approach is based on developing a greater understanding. For example, writing in the Harvard Business Review, Eric Shuman, Eric Knowles, and Amit Goldenberg (2023) presented their research finding that one of the best ways to overcome resistance to DEI is to understand what’s driving it. They found that, “DEI initiatives often involve significant organizational changes and thus can elicit threat and concern, particularly from members of majority groups, who have traditionally benefitted from being in the majority and may feel that their organizational status or resources are threatened” (para. 5). They also found that, “Some people resist DEI initiatives by downplaying inequality or bias or even denying that they exist at all. Denying is usually elicited [by] members of majority groups” (para. 11), and that, “In some cases, members of advantaged groups are willing to acknowledge that there is discrimination and inequality, but they distance themselves from it personally, by arguing that they themselves are unbiased and have never benefited from discrimination” (para. 14).
Returning to some of the main takeaways of my joint opening plenary presentation with Dr. Liying Cheng, another main point we made was that because our Cheng-Curtis family is from so many different linguistic and cultural contexts and countries, diversity is not just something we research and write about, publish and present on, it is something we live every day of our lives. That puts us in a different category from those people who may, for example, have lived their lives looking and sounding like most of the people around them but who still claim to know about diversity. We consider them to be experts in the theory of diversity, but without lived experience of being, for example, a visible minority, those experts’ purported understanding of diversity will be stuck at the theoretical level, and they cannot make it to the practical plane of a deeper understanding. A third point we made was how much we in our field may seriously underestimate just how fierce the opposition to real diversity is in the world today, as we saw in the recent U.S. presidential elections, in which well over 70 million Americans voted—again, for the second time—for someone who has spent his entire life making hateful, racist statements, all of which are a matter of public record and extremely well-documented. And not just in the U.S.A., as we have seen a lurch to the (far) right in the recent election outcomes in a number of other countries as well, such as Italy, Finland, Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia, and the Czech Republic (Coi, 2024). “Death to Diversity” seems to be the rallying cry of those (far) right wing (pseudo-)political parties. The pressing question then becomes: What (if anything) can we do to save and grow real diversity?
My general feeling is diversity feels distant to those of the majority. Despite some people expressing surface-level empathy, is it true that we cannot truly feel others’ pain so to speak?
I would agree with the surface-level versus deep-level sympathy/empathy difference you describe, and in some ways that is not surprising. For example, while working in U.K. hospitals for many years, before coming to language education, I witnessed and assisted with dozens of births. But even if I had helped with hundreds or even thousands of births, I would never, ever talk about the experience of childbirth from a woman’s perspective. My point is that there are many experiences that we will never have, and while we might sympathize with someone who has had or is going through that experience, we cannot know what it really feels like unless we have experienced it ourselves, directly and firsthand. Another activity we took part in while working in hospitals was to have our eyes completely covered for many hours to have some small sense of what it is like be born blind. But again, there is no way that my experience of not being able to see anything for a few hours—or for days or weeks or even longer—would qualify me to talk about what it is like to born blind. A similar activity, with specially designed earplugs, was used to help us have some kind of understanding of what it is like to be born deaf. And, although senses such as vision and hearing are not the same as skin colour or other visible differences, I do not expect even my closest White friends, who I have known for decades and who I love, to know anything about what my life has been like as a lifelong visible minority, compared with their experience of having lived their whole entire lives as White men in a White world (in this case, Canada), making them the most privileged group of people on this Earth.
Japan has often been described as ethnically and culturally homogeneous, where uniformity is valued in school and work life. How can educators effectively convince Japanese students of the importance of diversity?
Although I have been coming to Japan and to JALT conferences since the 1990s, I have not (so far) had the opportunity to spend an extended period of time there, so I must acknowledge that any comments I make about the contexts in Japan are the perspectives of an outsider. That said, I know from my decades of working with Japanese students, in and out for Japan, that Japan has often been described, as you say, as ethnically and culturally homogeneous, where uniformity is valued in school and work life. That description relates to the diversity is difficult point made above and may have something to do with the fundamentally—even fatally wrong—idea about purity; for example, misguided attempts to keep a language and/or a culture “pure.” As we can see, throughout human history, all such attempts have failed, and no matter what the (far) right populist, race-baiting, policy-free politicians say, all such attempts are doomed to fail because “diversity is life whereas purity is death” (Curtis, 2017a). Far beyond whatever political rhetoric may be embodied by the idea that “diversity is life and purity is death,” is a simple fact of all biological existence on Earth, true at the cellular level and even at the genetic level.
I point out to my students that Japanese genetics is actually quite diverse, ranging first from the original ancient Jomon people followed by the Yayoi and Kofun people from the Asian mainland to the Ainu, Okinawans, and others. I definitely think ideas of purity are pervasive in Japan. While these myths have been utilized to create solidarity in peoples’ identities in nation-building activities, they are problematic because they have been used to “other” minorities and people who don’t fit the mold.
To respond to the question, “How can educators effectively convince Japanese students of the importance of diversity?” one of the most important life lessons I learned was as a young, clinical biochemist, working in hospitals in the U.K. in the 1980s. When we were able to produce a truly pure strain of any organic entity, even the smallest change in the environmental conditions resulted in the almost immediate death of the entity because it had what we referred to as ZEA, or zero environmental adaptability. Perhaps one of the most horrifying twists of language for political purposes is the use of Charles Darwin’s notion of “survival of the fittest” by Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party of Germany (and it is still used today by those who would like to see a return to such genocidal, eugenic times). Darwin meant that living organisms best suited or fitted to adapt to the environment and to changes in that environment would survive and thrive, not survival of the strongest, as it came to mean during the Holocaust. So, when I meet people who ask me why I have committed so much of my professional life to promoting diversity in all its many shades of meaning (Curtis & Romney, 2006), I explain to them why “diversity is life, purity is death” is not a political slogan, but as a fundamental fact of life, governing all life on Earth. That is why diversity is vital to the very survival of our species.
Very interesting perspective. Many young Japanese students have often been described as apolitical or apathetic towards politics with low voter turnout. Is it important that language teachers help students not only with their grammar and word choice, but also to become more interested in politics and politically aware? If so, how would you suggest doing so?
Keeping in mind my caveat above, about me being an outsider in Japan, I am aware of the problems of low voter turnout, especially among younger people, and not only in Japan, but in many other countries too, for some years now (Solijonov, 2016). Those people who have been shouting “death to diversity” may also be the same people shouting, “death to democracy,” and they are likely to be happy to see such political apathy, as that makes it easier for them to justify running authoritarian states and dictatorial regimes. “Well,” the dictators may say, “they do not care so much about your so-called democracy—otherwise, they would vote. Right? They don’t vote means they don’t care, so maybe they’d be better off without your high-and-mighty, self-righteous democracy. They want order, and we will give them that—whatever the pain and suffering required to create that order.” You do not need to look closely to see the many flaws in such argumentative justifications, but such self-serving rationales raise the question of whether or not we as language teachers should “help students not only with their grammar and word choice, but also to become more interested in politics and politically aware.”
Regarding this question, context is critical (Curtis, 2017b), because in a number of countries in which I have spent time, becoming interested in politics and politically aware can be dangerous—up to and including life-threatening consequences. I will not risk offending any of the potential readers of this interview by naming those countries, but the countries which equate “pro-democracy” with “anti-government” are widely known as such. Therefore, if I as a teacher—as a figure of authority—were to encourage my students in those anti-democratic contexts and countries to become politically active, I may endanger their lives, the lives of their families, and my own life. I have seen real-life examples of well-meaning foreign teachers turning up in a country in which they did not understand the local and national politics, encouraging their students to become politically active, only to be fired, deported, imprisoned, or worse. Linguistically, then, the differences between “interested in politics,” “politically aware,” and “politically active” can be essential. The problem is that one tends to lead to the other, as interest is often followed (or preceded) by awareness, which often ends up being followed by action. Context is critical.
That’s a great point.
But where and when it is safe to do so, a great way of encouraging students to be “more interested in politics and politically aware” is to study the recent developments in South Korea, when (former) President Yoon Suk Yeol tried to unilaterally impose martial law, but which was met with fierce resistance from everyone, including those who were willing to risk their lives to protect their democracy and to prevent it from being overthrown (Ng et al., 2025). Studying recent events in South Korea could help students in Japan and elsewhere not take their democratic rights for granted.
Do you think there are any issues with how the ideas of diversity have been implemented and/or institutionalized in many countries? For example, affirmative action, identity politics, quotas or DEIA (or, as you suggested in your plenary, changing the acronym to IDEA) hiring practices, the woke movement, Black Lives Matter, et cetera, have been met with resistance from the hegemonic majority, and do you think they sometimes exacerbate the problem?
Yes, I have found that there are many issues with how the ideas of diversity have been implemented and/or institutionalized, one of which is the massive push-back against diversity from large, powerful, and extremely well-funded groups vigorously opposed to being more inclusive for fear of contaminating the perceived purity of their mainstream racial, cultural, and linguistic dominance. A good example of how small but very vocal and mainly well-meaning groups can sometimes make matters worse is the rise and fall of the word Latinx. As Luisita Torregrosa (2021) reported some years ago, that word “might have been intended to be more inclusive, but it actually can feel exclusionary to everyday people” (para. 5) and that, “Many Latinos say ‘Latinx’ offends or bothers them.” In 2024, Alicia Gonzalez (2024) explained despite the fact that Latinx “gained traction in academic and activist circles, particularly among those advocating for LGBTQ+ inclusivity … traditional terms like Hispanic and Latino remain overwhelmingly preferred” (para. 2). Also in 2024, Marciela García asked: “Why is the term Latinx so strongly rejected by Latinos?” and reported that, “Despite increased awareness of the term, only 4% of Latino adults use Latinx to describe themselves according to a new report.”
Despite such facts and figures, I know of some academics who have written well-researched papers and submitted them to relevant, high-profile journals in their field, but who were told, in no uncertain terms, that unless they used the word Latinx throughout their work, their paper would not be published. So, while 4% of a population may not be a statistically insignificant number of individuals, pushback is inevitable when, for example, 4% of a population feels that the other 96% should be using language in a particular way for specific purposes. That represents a more than 20-fold proportional difference (96 vs 4), which can help explain—beyond Neo-Nazi beliefs about “racial purity”—why the resistance to more real diversity can be so great.
Another example of well-meaning, but largely misguided language use is the current fashion for putting pronouns in people’s email signatures. Most of the members of the many LGBTQ+ family, friends, and colleagues that I know personally and professionally do not indicate their preferred pronouns in their emails or text messages. When I ask them why not, they tell me that they believe such indications do little or nothing to bring about lasting, positive change in and for their communities, and sound more like virtue-signaling than genuine allyship. At worst, they tell me, such language use may even, inadvertently, play into the hands of the (far) right, as they can then ridicule and trivialize important issues, in this case, within the LGBTQ+ community, by labeling them as extremists who want to tell everyone what to say and how to say it. And, while that is not the intention of any of the activists I work with, that may well be the perception among everyday people.
You also had a session at JALT2024 on new peace linguistics (NPL). Could you describe the main points of that workshop? Specifically, could you address the differences between peace linguistics and new peace linguistics? Also, is there a methodology you recommend for people interested in pursuing this line of research?
As I wrote in my 2022 book, The New Peace Linguistics and The Role of Language in Conflict, in 2017, I was invited to present at the annual, international Hawai’i TESOL Conference, where I learned about their peacebuilding programs. During my JALT2024 workshop, I shared with the audience some of the details of my upbringing in England in the 1960s and 1970s, which was the opposite of peace, as I grew up with a combination of domestic violence at home and race-based violence on the streets. I was, then, fascinated by the idea that peace was something that could be researched and written about, published and presented on, taught and learned, as we do in TESOL, JALT, et cetera. The following year, in 2018, I was invited to develop and teach what appeared to be—and still appears to be—the first university-level, credit-bearing course on peace linguistics (PL). In 2019, I co-taught the course with Brigham Young University Hawai’i (BYU-H) professor, Nancy Tarawhiti, who, as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormon, or LDS), was able to bring to the PL course the faith-based connections that helped the course participants contextualize PL in relation to their belief systems.
One of the challenges of teaching such a new course was the lack of coursebooks on PL. In fact, at that time, no such books existed, and in an extensive search for PL teaching materials, I found that much of what did already exist under the title of PL was very heavy on the P and very light on the L. By that I mean the peace side of PL was the focal point, but the L part, in terms of in-depth, systematic analyses of language, was conspicuous by its absence. After analyzing the contents of many of the top journals in the fields of peace studies, peace research, and peace education, I was surprised and disappointed to see that almost none of them explicitly referred to the importance of language studies, language research, or language education (Curtis, 2018). At best, superficial lip service was paid to the importance of language, but usually language was ignored, and most of what passed for PL at that time encouraged language teachers and learners to use language that would either avoid or de-escalate conflict, which is something most people probably do most of the time anyway. So, to address those oversights in the literature, I started carrying out in-depth, systematic analyses of the language of people in power, such as U.S. presidents, as it is they who have the nuclear launch codes, so it is they, not us in our language classrooms, who have the power to start wars, to end wars, or to bring an end to the world (Curtis, 2024a). A key principle of what has come to be called the new peace linguistics (sometimes referred to as applied peace linguistics) is to be able to distinguish between language used to communicate versus language used to manipulate.
Do you have any recommendations for textbooks for L2 learners to increase their media literacy?
Rather than textbooks on media literacy, which tend to be expensive and can sometimes quickly become dated, as the media landscape keeps changing—especially now with AI-driven media development—I usually recommend free, online resources. For example, the Media & Learning Association (MLA, [n.d.]) is an international, non-profit organization created in 2012 and is based in Belgium, so it has a more European focus. But in 2023, the MLA newsletter featured more than 60 articles on digital and media literacy across Europe and beyond, and at the end of 2023, they published a piece on the top five featured articles on media literacy that year (details in the references list).
Could you provide some practical activities that would help teachers incorporate new peace linguistics into the classroom in Japan?
One example of a practical activity that language teachers and learners could make use of in classrooms in Japan helps to raise the awareness of how we not only use words to refer to objects in the world around us (“computer,” “keyboard,” “interview,” et cetera) but how our words shape our thoughts and feelings (Curtis, 2022). In the activity, students are paired up, and one is given a piece of paper on which is a silhouette of a man carrying a large rifle, wearing military clothes and carrying military gear. Unbeknownst to the pair of students, who cannot see each other’s pieces of paper, both of them have been given the same silhouette. But on one piece of paper, the caption reads, “A freedom fighter, defending their country and their people from an invasion of hostile forces,” while on the other, the caption reads, “A terrorist gunman, getting ready to start shooting innocent people as they walk peacefully by.” Same picture, same number of words—but completely different meanings. In the activity, the students do not describe the image (as the description is already given in the caption), but they do talk about how the image makes them feel. It should be no surprise that most of the feelings elicited by the “freedom fighter” image were positive, and the opposite for the “terrorist gunman” image. The looks on the students’ faces when they show each other their pieces of paper and realize that they were describing the same image have included shock, disbelief, and sometimes even a tear has been shed in the intensity of that moment.
That’s a very interesting and powerful classroom activity. I’d like to try it.
This activity should only be done in a classroom where the teachers and students have gotten to know each well, who trust each other, and in an environment where the students feel safe in expressing some potentially intense feelings. I have then followed that activity with one in which I show a photograph of the 45th president of the U.S.A. crossing out the word “Corona” and replacing it with the word “China” in his printed script as he prepared to give a speech to his followers. Changing just one word in a single speech, given by one of the most powerful people on Earth, immediately resulted in a widely reported dramatic increase in verbal and physical attacks on Asian-looking people in the U.S.A. (see, for example, Viala-Gaudefroy & Lindaman, 2021). Something that continues to surprise me is how often even people in our field—language teachers who do language for a living, whose profession and career are based on language—still appear to underestimate just how powerful a single word can be, especially when that word comes from someone in power. NPL is based on the fact that a word has the potential to be as damaging and destructive as a bullet or a bomb.
Yes, I agree that language is power and sometimes “the pen is mightier than the sword.” What would be your advice for better public discourse from leaders from around the world?
The short, simple answer to that would be: Stop talking! Epictetus, the Stoic philosopher of Ancient Greece, is often credited with saying, “We have two ears and one mouth so that we may listen twice as much as we speak.” Sadly, most of the world leaders that I have studied appear to have fallen in love with the sound of their own voice. And, while that is disappointing and highly problematic, perhaps it should not be a surprise, given the rise of social media (or anti-social media), in which the loudest voices, saying the most outrageous things, garner the most followers, and therefore generate the most revenue. As a result of two decades of social media—Facebook was launched in 2004, and Twitter (aka X) in 2006—there now exists an entire generation of younger people who have grown up their whole lives seeing just how much attention narcissists can now get. And not just attention, but apparent fame and fortune too, although much of that may well be fake. Connecting Epictetus and Facebook/Twitter, across more than 2,000 years of human history, we can see that people who listen gain far few followers on such media, whereas people who talk constantly, even if they are always spouting complete nonsense, have disturbingly large numbers of followers.
So true. The social media machine, driven by the constant need to entertain/be entertained while also stoking fear and anger, has really caused a pandemic of sensationalism.
Latching onto that trend, and attempting to influence as many people as possible, world leaders such the 45th (and 47th) president of the U.S.A. exemplify an approach to communication in which constantly talking without any signs of listening or hearing appears to be the road to success and a way of becoming one of the most powerful people in the world (at least from the weapons-of-mass destruction military perspective). So, that would be my first communicative advice to world leaders for better public discourse: Talk less, listen more. Building on that advice, it would also make a world of difference if world leaders would listen more actively, and above all more empathetically, in which the emphasis is on understanding not just the words coming out of the other person’s mouth, but also listening between the lines; for example, to hear what is not being said explicitly. A third piece of advice from me to world leaders would be for them to please stop behaving like angry, frightened five-year olds on the school playground, engaged in name-calling. Whoever said, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me” was apparently never on the receiving end of the kind of hateful name-calling engaged in by some five-year olds and some world leaders alike. I know, from decades of personal experience, just how much hurt those names can cause.
Then how do we get people to talk with each other—to actually listen to each other—instead of talking at each other?
In addition to my three pieces of advice above, the sad fact is that people cannot be made or forced to really listen to anyone saying anything. Again—thinking of world leaders in connection with young children who cover their ears whilst making nonsensical la-la-la-la-la sounds with their mouths so they cannot hear what is being said—if someone is determined not to hear and not to listen, then there is little that can be done about that. Even so, the prepositional differences between “talking at,” “talking to,” and “talking with” are still important. When “talking at,” the speaker sees the listener as, at best, a passive recipient of the message being delivered by the words being said, and at worst, the listener is seen by the speaker as being an irrelevant object, just there to soak up the sound. “Talking to” is better, as the listener is seen as more of a person than an object, but not a person of importance, at least, from the speaker’s point of view, not as important as the speaker, otherwise, the speaker would be “talking with.” In the latter, the speaker sees the listener as a partner in a conversational, communicative event, even if the listener is not seen as an equal partner, for example, because the speaker is in a position of authority over the listener.
A key question then is: How to move people from “talking at” and “talking to” to “talking with?” The answer may lie with the role of the listener, as in the three scenarios above, the speaker is in the dominant position. However, as language teaching-learning professionals, we know how much a listener’s reactions and responses can influence what a speaker says and how they say it. In most countries, cultures, and interactional contexts, non-verbal (or paralinguistic) communication from the listener back to the speaker can have a significant effect. The human face is capable of making a myriad of different expressions (Cowen & Keltner, 2020), including joy, pain, hunger, anger, et cetera. But, for example, in tense conversations between friends or high-level international negotiations, a listener having a “poker face,” in which the facial expression is hard to read and appears to be “neutral,” can help to keep things calm, and avoid an unhelpful escalation of emotion. For example, if the listener hears something that makes them angry or sad or elicits some other emotional reaction deemed to be negative, and that listener’s reaction is seen by the speaker, then the focus can shift from what is being said and heard to what is being communicated non-verbally, which can lead to a complete breakdown of communication. So, we must be as careful and as conscious with our non-verbal as with our verbal communication.
Great advice. I once was talking to a student from Europe and was surprised when he commented to me that every country needs an enemy country. Is conflict, war, and tribalism just part of human nature, as seen with the ever-growing military-industrial complex around the world?
The view expressed by your student from Europe is not uncommon, but it is contested. For example, Brian Ferguson (2018), a professor of anthropology at Rutgers University in the U.S.A., has written extensively on this topic, and he has pointed out that, “Debate over war and human nature will not soon be resolved” (para. 28). There are some who claim that historical records of human civilizations have always left artifacts that are evidence of war, for example, fossilized weapons. But according to Ferguson’s research: “War is hardly ubiquitous and does not go back endlessly in the archaeological record … early finds provide little if any evidence suggesting war was a fact of life” (para. 10–para. 27). And he concluded that, “The high level of killing often reported in history, ethnography or later archaeology is contradicted in the earliest archaeological findings around the globe” (Ferguson, 2018, para. 29). But the ancient principle of “safety in numbers” does appear to have held throughout human history, perhaps going all the way back to our earliest ancestors when we had to band together to stay alive. From those bands probably came tribes, but tribalism does not appear to have predisposed us to war, and it is likely that tribes working together, rather going to war with each other, is how we as a species have thrived and survived.
However, looking at the world today, including the wars between Russia and Ukraine, Israel and Palestine, as well as the armed conflicts in Syria, Sudan, and elsewhere, the view of your student from Europe—and of many other people too—is that war between humans is inevitable. The good news, then, appears to be that war has not been a constant throughout human history, which means that it does not always have to be a part of our future. The bad news is that the infamous military-industrial complex is “more powerful than ever,” according to researchers like William Hartung and Benjamin Freeman (2023). They found that the complex that U.S. President Eisenhower “warned Americans about more than 60 years ago is still alive and well. In fact, it’s consuming many more tax dollars and feeding far larger weapons producers than when Ike [Eisenhower] raised the alarm” (para. 1). It seems, then, that the two things—wars and the military-industrial complex—are not the same and that one is not necessarily reliant on the other, which can give us hope that the future of humanity does not have to be as war-torn as its past.
You mentioned in your plenary talk that the level of education was a key factor in the results of the 2024 U.S. election. However, there were many highly educated people who voted the way they did. I find it challenging to change people’s minds once their core beliefs have been set. Can we really change people’s minds? Was it really an ill-informed electorate? Is it impossible to get people out of their media bubbles?
In November 2024, the Research Department of the Statista organization, which I have found to be a reliable source of data, reported that, “According to exit polling in ten key states of the 2024 presidential election in the United States, almost two-thirds of voters who had never attended college reported voting for Donald Trump. In comparison, a similar share of voters with advanced degrees reported voting for Kamala Harris” (Tierney, 2024, para. 1). The results of those polls, and of others, involving tens of thousands of voters, clearly show the influence of education as a crucial factor in the results of the 2024 U.S. presidential election. For example, reporting for Inside Higher Ed, Johanna Alonso (2024) explained that “College-educated voters were more likely to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris than Donald Trump across all demographics,” with the gap being “greatest among white voters and men.” More specifically, “college graduates … individuals with a bachelor’s or advanced degree … made up 43 percent of the electorate this year. Of that group, 55 percent voted for Vice President Kamala Harris and 42 percent voted for Donald Trump.” Not only that, but: “The numbers were almost exactly reversed among those who hadn’t graduated college, 42 percent of whom voted for Harris and 56 percent of whom voted for Trump,” and the bottom line is that “college graduates voted for Harris by 13 points more than they did Trump.”
It should, then, be no surprise that Trump has publicly stated that he loves the poorly educated (Fares & Cherelus, 2016). And even though he also included, in that 2016 comment, a reference to “the highly educated,” in the 2016 Nevada election, which is where and when Trump declared his love for “the poorly educated,” the CNN entrance polls showed that nearly 60% of voters with a high school education or less voted for Trump (Hafner, 2016). If we compare those figures with the final results of the 2024 U.S. presidential election, there can be no doubt that education—or the lack thereof—was clearly a deciding factor in the outcome. To be clear, approximately 75 million electors voted for Harris, while approximately 77 million voted for Trump—making a difference of just 1.5% (48.4% vs 49.9%). In the winner-takes-all election-outcomes game that has made a mockery of true democratic principles in the U.S.A. and elsewhere, the fact that the difference was such a little percentage does not matter. But as educators, we know that the less education someone has, the more likely they are to believe, for example, whatever is posted on anti-social media. They are also less likely to change their minds and be open to reason, due to a limited capacity for critical thinking, and their inability to distinguish between an obviously demonstrable lie and a factual statement supported with reliable data (Curtis, 2024b).
We have also seen in recent political elections that economic issues often drive voters’ choices of candidate. How can we get people to think beyond their wallet and become more mindful, open, tolerant, accepting, and caring of other social issues like diversity? Or is there little hope with greed and selfishness winning out?
Whilst I was writing my initial responses to these questions (at the beginning of 2025), Justin Trudeau resigned as the Prime Minister of Canada (where our home base is). One of the big issues that led to that resignation was immigration, specifically the feeling amongst many Canadians that too many immigrants had been allowed to come here, which is why our healthcare, housing, and education systems are in such states of disrepair and dysfunction. Unfortunately, in the 25 years since we came as immigrants to this big, beautiful country, those three human rights—access to affordable, quality healthcare, housing, and education—have been increasingly politicized by all Canadian political parties. That is the real reason for the dramatic and harmful decline in those services, in one of the richest countries in the world. Immigration is not the problem here, especially given that Canada as a modern nation would not exist without immigration. Apart from the original Indigenous peoples who called their home “Kanata,” every other person who has ever set foot on Canadian soil is, by definition, an immigrant. No immigrants, no Canada. This same anti-immigrant sentiment has been cultivated by other (far) right-wing world leaders, including the 45th/47th U.S. president, who has blamed immigrants for everything bad over many decades, up to and including his most recent proclamations about launching the “largest deportation in American history” and his promises to “deport millions on ‘Day One’” (Bianco, 2024, para. 1).
As the first president of the U.S.A., George Washington (1732–1799) famously described America as “the Great Experiment” (Richardson, 2018), which has, since then, also been described as a failing or failed experiment (Collins, 2020; Goidel, 2013). What would be a fascinating socio-political experiment would be for countries like Canada and the U.S.A. to ask everyone who has emigrated to their countries in the last, say, 25 years or so, since the dawn of the new millennium, to go back to their home countries. Not permanently, just as part of the experiment. Very quickly, the economies of the countries would collapse, as it is invariably the immigrants who do the low-pay, long-hour, no-prospect jobs that the locals do not want to do (as my parents did in England in the 1950s and 60s). After the economies collapsed, the immigrants would be invited back, to save those countries once again, as we always end up doing. A great deal of research, including some of my own (Curtis & Cheng, 2001), has shown that people change when they are forced to change, in cases where not to change would be to their detriment. In other words, we change, as not changing would be worse for us than making that change. Having economies collapse due to anti-immigration policies would be an effective way of helping people who are vigorously and even violently opposed to immigration, diversity, and democracy become “more mindful, open, tolerant, accepting, and caring of other social issues like diversity.”
Now that you are a well-established scholar, will you ever reclaim your original name and perhaps become “The scholar formerly known as Andy Curtis?” Are you in favor of L2 English language learners choosing a nickname or a traditionally Caucasian sounding name? I’ve noticed that many of my Chinese students choose to have a nickname while this isn’t the case for most Japanese students.
Prince Rogers Nelson was the full name of the musician who came to be known simply as “Prince” (1958–2016). In 1993, after a falling out with his record label, Prince changed his name and formally adopted the heart symbol, which he called the Love Symbol, instead of using a word for his name. As a symbol cannot be said, Prince was known at that time as “the Artist Formerly Known as Prince.” As I have always been a big fan of Prince, I do like the idea of “the scholar formerly known as Andy Curtis.” My dad and I did talk about me changing my family name/surname back to his, which was Sookdeo (my Mum’s maiden names were Persaud and Sookram). But after he was killed, I decided to keep it as Curtis. Liying’s family name is Cheng, my son’s and grandson’s surname are Yang, but my sister Sandra, in England, has kept Sookdeo, so the family name will probably live on.
Having been made to study the works of Shakespeare at high school in England in the 1980s, I did not expect to find myself teaching it decades later as a high school teacher. As a result, in the play, Romeo and Juliet, Juliet’s Act 2, Scene 2 soliloquy on the balcony has stayed with me: “Tis but thy name that is my enemy; Thou art thyself … O, be some other name! That which we call a rose, By any other name would smell as sweet … And for that name which is no part of thee, Take all myself.” About “L2 English language learners choosing a nickname or a traditionally Caucasian sounding name” and your observation that many of your “Chinese students choose to have a nickname while this isn’t the case for most Japanese students,” I think that may have a lot to do with whether or not their English language teachers can accurately pronounce non-English names without mangling them beyond recognition.
Final question: JALT is celebrating its 50th year as an association. How do you foresee the state of English Language Teaching in 50 years and any guesses on what the plenary speaker of the JALT2075 conference will be discussing?
Now there’s a great question to end on! As I am now in my early 60s, I know I will not be around in 50 years’ time, in 2075. But our son, Jack, turns 37 this year, so he may be around, and our grandson, Juan Sebastián, will be just four years old in June, so he should be around—as long as we have not destroyed our entire planet Earth by then in the name of corporate profits! I also met a number of younger JALT board members at JALT2024, including Emily Choong, who may also still be there at JALT2075, so how cool would it be if someone remembered this interview and referred to it at JALT2075! Any attempts to predict the future are, of course, fraught with peril, as these days we struggle to know what the world is coming to from one day to the next, much less half-a-century from now. In one vision of the future, language teaching and learning will no longer exist, as the translation technologies will have become so advanced that such teaching-learning will no longer be necessary.
As well as Prince, I am also still a big fan of the British humourist and sci-fi author, Douglas Adams (1952–2001), who died tragically at the age of just 49, from undiagnosed coronary artery disease, apparently immediately after working out at a private gym. This is one reason why I now go to our local gym—a low-cost, public one—three times a week. In his enormously successful radio, book, and television cult sci-fi series, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Adams described a creature called the Babel Fish. Once inserted into the ear, the small, yellow, leech-like fish “feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier, but from those around it … and then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which has supplied them … if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language” (Adams as quoted by Lim, 2018, para. 1). I hope that’s not the case, as recent research, using functional magnetic resonance imaging, has shown that bi- and multi-lingual brains are different from those of monolingual language users (Midrigan-Ciochina et al., 2024). And such research seems to show that those of us who know multiple languages have multiple ways of understanding the world, which may turn out to be one of our best hopes for world peace (as comedically highlighted by Sandra Bullock in her 2000 movie, Miss Congeniality). JALT2075: World Peace Through Global Multilingualism. I’d be happy to attend that conference!
Thank you, Dr. Curtis, for your detailed and thought-provoking responses!
And thank you, Torrin, for this opportunity to address so many important, large, and complex questions. I appreciate this opportunity to share more details of my work with the readers of TLT, and I look forward to this being the beginning of an on-going dialogue with JALT members.
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