Fluency. Language and Politics
by Nina Shevchuk-Murray
LET ME TELL you some things about being a non-native speaker. I know what it means to speak in words that only foggily reflect my true feelings and ideas, to settle for less, because less is better than nothing. I know how to memorize words and start using them. I know that a language is a system, and its structure can and will be labeled, classified, and represented as a network of relationships representing physical reality. I learned English from BBC radio and The New York Times.
For a few years, my brain and cheeks hurt from keeping the proper articulatory base, with that unbearable flat “e” and my mind strained to fill in the gaps—the vernacular English, the onomatopoeic, the baby-talk, the puppy-talk, political abbreviations, words for elementary bodily functions, euphemisms. In the late summer of 2002, I entered my marriage to Sean Murray and the English language. I was the kind of person about whom Sam Seaborn, a “West Wing” character says: “You gotta love the guy who doesn’t understand ‘frumpy’ but knows the word ‘onomatopoeia.’”
I might not recognize “pushing up the daisies” for what it really means, but I can lecture on the etymology of the words “husband” and “wife” (both originally referring primarily to economic functions, not familial). I am an adjunct instructor of English. I read, I breathe, I eat, I write. I get visions of myself as a hitchhiker on the side of the great capitalistic highway that higher education has become: I jump into a vehicle of an occasional course, strike up a conversation with whomever is already riding, and get off to take care of the rest of my life. The little monetary value assigned to the services I render, the back seat in the shared cubicle, the unreliability of my engagement (will enough sections fill? Will I get hours tutoring in the writing center?)—all convince me that I am but an accidental bystander on the great all-American college highway.
On the bad days (when I get my paycheck, or get turned down for another part-time job because I’m woefully overqualified), I console myself by thinking that in that metaphor of the highway I am not yet roadkill. On the good days, I write about the accidental nature of my employment.
Quite frankly, my students and I are on the same mountain. The main difference between me and my typical student is that my sentences form themselves with a half-conscious attempt at grace. Unconscious even because I don’t really need to care about syntactic or lexical fineries for my utterances to be still accurate and “free of mistakes.”
My road to this blissfully self-indulgent musing was traveled in a vehicle with two pedals, (fluency and accuracy). I don’t really have words flowing from my brain onto the page; my brain does take a second here and there to determine accurate meanings, correct spelling—that’s when I have to hit delete and retype. Neither do I have to translate everything I have to say from my native language, as many ESL students do.
What is rarely known, is that the process of becoming fluent in another language is a very physical process of storing information in a new part of the brain and remapping that part into a reflection of a different world picture. In microscopic terms, if you wired my neurons to a machine registering brain activity, and then said “table” first in English and then in Russian, you would see responses from two different sets of cells. Not only are the sound-forms of the word stored separately, the image-forms, the ideas of “table” are slightly different and also stored separately. This is how I know I’m bilingual: at some point during the 15 years of studying English, my brain reorganized its information storage to cut the retrieval time by not referring first to the Russian side and then searching an equivalent on the English side. “Table” was a simplistic example. Think, however, of what it means to have separate ideas for “love,” “war,” or “freedom,” or to have ideas that do not match the other side, that exist exclusively in English, like the Anglophone “compulsory heterosexuality” or the Slavic “to bite one’s elbows.”
It’s a double world out there in some contexts. In my marriage, for instance, English is the only reflection of my existence, and in others, should I chose to vote, Russian or Ukrainian will be my single frame of reference. Fascinating stuff, you might say, but what does it matter? Notice how this explanation of my bilinguality, an explanation of myself, has compelled me to acknowledge a possible audience for it. Truly, it is impossible to observe and participate at the same time; once I have alienated myself into an object of observation, I cannot, it seems, be content without presenting it to others. This inevitability acknowledged, I proceed. What does it matter, I wonder, that I only know one other non-native speaker whose profession is to teach English? That I don’t know any non-natives leading ESL programs. That on my own campus, where I have been asked to help other writing tutors with an ESL student, my offer to run a tutor workshop in teaching ESL remains just that.
There is a common belief, fueled, perhaps, by the legends of grandpa getting off the boat from Greece with no English, and eventually owning his own company. It is the conviction that anyone, from anywhere, can be successful in the American English-speaking environment if they just get here. It is a myth, of course, but somehow it has morphed into an entire institutional philosophy. It is to this philosophy that we owe the assumptions that fail our ESL programs daily: that native speakers are better teachers of English than the non-natives; that going to a public school, speaking English at work, and consuming English programming on television and radio will result in English proficiency without any outside help; that the immersion in the language environment is the irreplaceable sine qua non of successful language acquisition for everyone, at every level.
Here’s what I think. Every time faculty teach based on these assumptions, it’s a mistake. Or, if you prefer, it’s participating in the great conspiracy to keep immigrants and other non-native English speakers on the margins of the American language communities. The supermarket check-out, the recitation of The Pledge of Allegiance, or the ability to sustain employment as a janitor are not measures of fluency in English.
The non-profits that get funding to provide English classes free of charge do not get funding to train their tutors. As a result, all that is taught is, precisely, the language required for a janitor’s job. The ESL classes that are taught by professionals at my community college do not count for credit and are not covered by any financial aid program. The Vietnamese student, whom no one in your Intro. to Comp. class can understand, and whose papers get passing grades only after several visits to the Writing Center, is a familiar presence.
Take this situation one step further—consider it symptomatic not only of the position of the limited English proficient (LEP) population, but of the perception of language fluency in the American culture in general. Put aside the considerations of diversity, and the freedom to practice one’s faith in one’s native language, and focus for an instant on a Russian-Christian refugee (on the quick path to citizenship) who speaks Russian at home and English in public. The fact that it doesn’t matter to this society in what language his/her Sunday sermon is delivered is a manifestation of the same misconception of language fluency that produces the freshman native student who repeats the rhetoric of “freedom” without acknowledging its propagandist nature.
In other words, if citizenship (both as the act of “naturalization” and as the principle of active participation in the society) don’t require the ability to understand charged discourse in English, why would it surprise anyone that it doesn’t require the ability to analyze such discourse? This is not about the Russian refugee anymore. This is not about countless LEP students in college classrooms and writing centers, whose failures and struggles baffle the writing instructors into feeling guilty, but not into action. This is not even about the frustrated non-native teachers of English, like me, who could provide theoretical and practical training on the institutional scale but who are relegated, once again, to the margins of the teaching community, adjunct positions, three hours a week in the Writing Center—anywhere but the positions where they could help.
I still help. I do my job. I tutor Russian and Peruvian immigrants in the Writing Center, and I start my basic writing courses by teaching my native speakers the proper formation of verb forms, especially in the perfective tenses and conditional clauses. I teach them the concepts of tense and clause, too. I rely on my own learning experiences as an ESL student to set standards for my native speakers. I try to teach them, just as I had been taught, with the goal of reaching the lingustic proficiency of NPR broadcasters or writers in The New Yorker.
I rely on standard foreign language teaching techniques to train their memory, to improve their fluency and accuracy. Occasionally, I even manage to see the irony of the situation: after all, what we know now as the modern ESL methodology grew out of the U.S. Army’s need to train its officers in spoken Vietnamese, fast.
