Primary learning in a multilingual society

Eunice Lee is a seven-year old girl who is studying in primary one. She is enrolled in a private school, which requires her traveling for two hours each morning to the so-called better school. On the eve of Labour Day, she returned to her grandparents' house with exercises from school in three languages. Eunice has to learn Malay, English and Mandarin in school. Her favorite language is English and she dislikes Mandarin, her school-based mother tongue. Right after lunch at 3 o’clock one afternoon Eunice started to complete her homework. The problem-solving strategy that required her selecting and creating answers for the blanks was invoked. This strategy was chosen with the awareness that she hated the Spartan learning style, which made her cry before when she was attending kindergarten. It was the least stressful method in solving linguistic problems for her without sacrificing learning too much.

                                 Eunice doing her mother tongue homework at her workstation

Malay was the first exercise type that Eunice did. She was asked to spell and read the words including the instructions. Whenever she was stranded at a syllable, spelling aid was rendered and she continued with the pronunciation before figuring out what to do with the questions. Her tasks included selecting the right color terms for different objects, such as grapes (anggur), hibiscus (bunga raya), grass (rumput), etc., naming objects by pairing the words with images, and serializing pictures in a flow of before-and-after sequence. The tasks were relatively manageable for Eunice; however, the reading of instructions and words via syllabic segmentation was rather challenging. She had to figure out that [i] is a suffix in /mempunyai/ (owns), which is a four-syllabic word /mem-pun-ya-i/ rather than three */mem-pun-yai/.

In comparison to Malay, English was relatively easy for Eunice who had to decide which picture should be matched with /thank you/ in a relationship chain. The person who received a gift or assistance would require the politeness tag as the corresponding utterance. In another Malay exercise, Eunice had to construct sentences for a pictorial sequence, namely one with a girl smiling at a birthday cake and the other showing the girl thanking her mother for a present. This exercise was trying for Eunice as she needed help in Mandarin to clarify matters and draw upon her personal experience from celebrating her sister’s birthday. The language of metacommunication for completing school work oscillated between Mandarin and English in a complicated way. Mandarin was used to encourage her thinking about Jessie, her sister, and the things related to Jessie's birthday celebration. Yet, English was required to fix the syntactic and spelling errors.

                                                      Jessie and Eunice at Legoland

Interestingly, English became the means of explanation in approaching the Malay exercise and English plus Mandarin were the language mediums for talking about the English exercise. The metacommunication of homework solving was a combination of English and Mandarin plus some onomatopoeia for making academic tasks more aligned to a primary school pupil’s mind. Not a single phrase at the metacommunication level was sanitized according to the standard written format in a particular language. This was obvious at the syntactic level as each phrasal segment contained a smattering of nouns, verbs, adjectives, and sounds conjoined within a code-mixing mould involving two of the three languages that Eunice learns. 

Mandarin, a tricky subject for Eunice, was the last exercise type to complete. Eunice, who dislikes Mandarin, has to deal with Mandarin school work that contained very many characters testing one's linguistic-visual spatial memory. The hardest exercise already had the answer choices marked with the number of the questions. Eunice informed that the teacher dropped hints for them, reinforcing negatively the pupil's belief that Mandarin was indeed difficult. The hints that resolved 15% of  the work have made learning Mandarin more opaque. For the remaining Chinese exercises, Eunice had to match pictures with phrases, fill in the blanks with phrases, copy Mandarin characters in a series of writing transformation beginning from the basic strokes to a radical formation before the complete emergence of the Mandarin character; and she had to place punctuation marks, namely a question mark, a comma, or a period in the correct places within or at the end of several Mandarin phrases.

In the learning interactivity, Mandarin was used to talk about the Chinese exercises, as it is the common language between Eunice and her maternal grandparents and parents (her biological mother tongue is Hokkien, spoken in her paternal household). Speaking Mandarin is very different from learning the written Chinese characters and understanding the syntactic constructions. A very young Chinese speaker such as Eunice, who may be fluent in spoken Mandarin, was unable to identify all the corresponding written Mandarin characters in complex phrases. Eunice also had difficulties in construing and producing syntactic segments according to a common Chinese scheme of knowledge, especially when she was already getting used to the logics of English scripts constructed for children in programs like Hi-5, Disney Junior, Okto Channel. 

                                Eunice and her cousin, Jiayi, undoing their mother tongue on stage in their glocal world

One may be interested to know that (Chinese) adults who sing the Mandarin pop songs of Jay Chou and Wang LeeHom may not recognize each Mandarin characters in the lyrics. A cognition with sound symbolic mapping capability and tone-sensitive filter would be sufficient for the musical rendition (cf. Sew 2014a on Mandarin /chun/ or spring being construed as leftover in Hokkien by means of sound symbolism).  The same principle applies when one sings in Hokkien, a southern Chinese dialect, because the target verbal Hokkien words are matched with the corresponding sound symbolic Mandarin characters since there is only one set of Chinese character for all the Chinese dialects.

Mandarin, Hokkien, Teochew and Cantonese do not share the same tones. For example, /sui/, or pretty in Hokkien is represented with 水, or water in written Mandarin on the Kara-oke screen. Although the tone of the Hokkien-/sui/ is different from 水, a 'polyglotal' Chinese may easily sort out the dialectal mapping almost instantaneously. Most of the time, however, the dialectal-phonetic-tonal pairing is irrelevant because only singing  and performing matter in the verbal repertoire for singing out loud.

The metacommunication of learning interaction in a multilingual society is a form of complex primary speech much more complicated than the monolingual prints on the exercise sheets (see MacCorquodale, 1970, p. 95 for a explanation on primary speech). In fact, the mode of metacommunication reflects the contemporary language use in a global world that involves a mixing of language codes (Hall & Cook, 2012). The complex dialogue structures in the English conversation between a female representative of an international organization with a prominent local figure in a Guyama community is a good example (Bartlett, 2014, p. 23).

Despite the romantic belief that language learning occurs in the guise of the formal language, spoken utterances on the fly either in a formal, or informal (learning) interactivity do not adhere to the standard variety at morphological and syntactic levels. This is due to the fact that other non-linguisitic indexes are required to complete communication tasks (Sew, 2009, Clark, 1996). One may want to ponder further if dropping out of the primary school has anything to do with the code of metacommunication. The code of instruction that is very different from the code of interaction at home might pose a learning hurdle to a child in acquiring academic knowledge in monolingual and multilingual societies. The notions of elaborated and restricted codes are relevant to understanding the matter (Bernstein, 1964) although this article does not correlate social class with the codes.

Many a times at secondary school level, educators are reminded to speak the language of teenagers in order to connect with the youngsters and secure their attention. Symbolic as it may seem, language as social capital  is another factor underpinning   language learning (Sew, 2012). The use of slang, for example, is a case in point. Slang is something frowned upon as a bad linguistic behavior despite its familiarity in the spoken and digital discourse of youngsters (see Sew, 2014b for a natural occurence of slang in a language learning situation).

Eunice did not cry after three and a half hours of homework coaching on Wednesday, although her eyes began to swell in tears when she was asked to take out the Mandarin work sheets the next day for reading practice. The reading practice was intended as a means to strengthen her linguistic-visual spatial memory for Mandarin. She did not do it, of course. The domestic helper came to her rescue by switching on the DVD player showing Walt Disney’s top computer-animated musical fantasy-comedy film, Frozen. Yes, I let it go by asking Eunice to play the song ‘Let it go’ sung by Idina Menzel again.

References

Bartlett, T. (2014). Analysing power In language: A practical guide. London: Routledge.

Bernstein, B. (1964). Elaborated and restricted codes: Their social origins and some consequences. American Anthropologist 66(6), Part 2, 55–69.

Clark, H. H. (1996). Using language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hall, G., & Cook, G. (2012). Own-language use in language teaching and learning. Language Teaching 45(3), 271-308.

MacCorquodale, K. (1970). On Chomsky's review of Skinner's 'Verbal Behavior'. Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior 13(1), 83–99.

Sew, Jyh Wee. (2009). Semiotik Persembahan Wacana [Semiotics of discourse performing]. Kuala Lumpur: University Malaya Press.

____________. (2012). Malay and global literacy. Akademika 82(2), 25-35. http://journalarticle.ukm.my/6118/1/Akademika_82(2)Chap_3-locked.pdf

____________. (2014a). Spring in other dialect. Grammar Gang (January issue).
http://thegrammargang.blogspot.sg/2014/01/spring-in-other-dialect.html

____________. (2014b). Slang: Beyond a knee-jerk reaction. Grammar Gang (April Issue). http://thegrammargang.blogspot.sg/2014/04/slang-beyond-knee-jerk-reaction.html

Jyh Wee Sew
Centre for Language Studies, Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences, National University of Singapore

Slang: Beyond a knee-jerk reaction

Here is a snippet of what was going on in a Malay language classroom. At the beginning of one particular tutorial discussion, the compound word air [water] mata [eye], or tears in the lyrics of a Malay song, entitled Sahabat (Friend, performed by Najwa Latif and featuring Sleet and Shamkamarul) was highlighted for discussion.

Before the lesson could proceed to the next Malay compound selected for discussion, one female student raised a question, “Isn’t air mata boyfriend?”  This knee-jerk reaction in foreign language learning indicated that Malay learners at tertiary level may also be interested in the slangy meanings, i.e. boyfriend or girlfriend beyond the dictionary meaning of air mata. In terms of language pedagogy, the learning diversion was an exciting topic to some male students who began to show a heightened interest in the morpheme.

The learning episode makes an interesting discussion of slang words in this blog post, not least because many young people incorporate slang in verbal communication when they make reference to a romantic partner. Actually, mata air, the inverse of air mata (tears) is the slang for romantic partner in Malay, which may imply that a boyfriend, or girlfriend has the potential to provoke tears.

                                        Mata air (image taken from http://travellermeds.blogspot.sg/2013/08/pemandian-air-panas-mengeruda-soa-ngada.html

In Standard Malay, the word mata air has a dictionary meaning which is spring, or water source. Reflecting further on the meaning in mata air may suggest that the reason for tears to be co-opted into the slang has to do with (erratic) emotional reactions that may come with maintaining a relationship. 

Turning to English, the slang for the same reference is associated with a popular word often uttered in American movies and television programs, namely chicks. From a second speaker viewpoint, the slang chicks may well be referring to small and cuddly qualities, reflecting further a functional aspect of the relationship in the particular speech culture. I welcome alternative explanations as the slangy meanings of chicks in American English. 

                                       Image taken from http://www.jackasscritics.com/movie.php?movie_key=557

Interestingly, the slangy chick has established itself as a force to be reckoned with in literature studies. Reflecting a particular literary genre, the term chick-lit is coined for writings about women of all ages. It is an indisputable fact that chick-lit has received considerable amount of media and academic attention across the globe (cf. Donadio, 2006). Among others, Indigeneous Australian writer, Anita Heiss' work, Not Meeting Mr Right and Avoiding Mr Right are regarded as significant works of chick-lit (Ommundsen, 2011).

During my undergraduate years, my peers co-opted the Cantonese word vegetable [choy] as the slang word for a potential boyfriend or girlfriend. Due to the multiple uses of this slang in Hong Kong drama and movies, the Cantonese morpheme remains a robust slang currently cutting across different types of speech situations. The slangy use of vegetable as romantic partner is also true among young speakers of Southeast Asian Mandarin.

Recently, vegetable or 菜 cài has become a slang word in Taiwanese Mandarin. The Mandarin 'vegetable' was used as slang in the interview between a host and a famous Taiwanese actress on television, as she replied to the local host, “You are not my vegetable” [ni bu shi wo de cài...] to reject the tongue in cheek offer from the male host as her boyfriend. 

Along the green vein, so to speak, many fruit names such as apple, banana, cucumber, and grapes are part of the descriptions for referring to certain human characteristics in English (Sew, 2014). The derivation of human references based on vegetables and fruits may have started as slangy references before the full acceptance and common use of the meanings in verbal communication.

There are several reasons for speakers to include slang as part of their utterances in communication. Peer-group bonding, or aping may be a reason for the use of choy when a young speaker is chatting with his friends casually. Peer-group identification or the desire to connect with her clique underpins my Chinese student's interest in using mata air as slang when she interacts with her Malay friends. One study reports that the use of slang is a self-protecting strategy for interaction in certain Malay speech community (Noriah & Norma, 2006). In this instance, slang becomes a masking tool in face-to-face communication.

In claiming that texting occupies an important position among youngsters, Deborah Tannen has noticed that young people prefer a digital text to a phone call, which is considered to be intrusive (McLaughlin, 2010). As a typical semiotic culture in using social media, inserting slangy lingo in electronic text augurs well with texting as an intimate form of communication for young people. For example, Eva Lam (2004) has studied the digital records of two female chat room users and noticed that certain texts contained hybrid phrases combining English and Cantonese. Lam's digital data such as open laugh mei (are you kidding) and hate 4 nei (hate you forever) are slangy digital exchanges. 

Ontologically speaking, our mind may be more poetic and capable of making hybrid connections to many abstract, or metaphorical notions derived from the original linguistic meanings when we operate digitally. The medium of communication is a relevant factor contributing to slang production because it is easy to text slangy morphemes via a smart phone, or utter slangy references face-to-face than to spell them out in print for mass distribution (Sew, 2010).

The inclusion of an alternative lingo within the electronic discourse runs parallel to the use of slang as a pragmatic diversion in oral communication. It is logical to assume that young netizens' construction of semiotic codings while interacting with each other, as a form of personal texting in the digital spaces, may be the underlining pragmatic reason for online advertisements to include hybrid Chinese expressions and phrases that are different from the standard grammar (Feng & Wu, 2007).

We may equate mata air in Malay with chicks in American English, 菜 or choy in Cantonese, or cài in Taiwanese and Southeast Asian Mandarin as the slangy lingo of young speakers, although chicks is limited to a female reference. (Perhaps, cock may be the English slang word referring to the male counterpart). 

Readers who know any slangy words communicated in the same way as mata air, chicks, or choy are invited to share their collection of slang words, as well as their reasons for making use of the slang words in daily communication.

References

Donadio, R. (2006). The Chick-Lit Pandemic. The New York Times, 19 Mar. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/19/books/review/19donadio.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Feng, J.W., & Wu, D. (2007). Cultural value change in mainland China's commercial discourse. In Shi-xu (Ed.), Discourse as cultural struggle (pp. 73-90). Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.

Lam, W.S.E. (2004). Second language socialization in a bilingual chat room: Global and local considerations. Language Learning & Technology 8(3), 44-65. http://llt.msu.edu/vol8num3/lam/default.html

McLaughlin, J. (2010). To text or not to text: Even young people don't know the answer. Inside Fordham. http://www.fordham.edu/campus_resources/enewsroom/inside_fordham/december_6_2010/news/to_text_or_not_to_te_77749.asp

Noriah Mohamed, & Norma Baharom. (2006). Pembentukan kata dalam slanga lelaki gender ketiga. In Paitoon Chaiyanara et al. (Ed.), Bahasa: Memeluk akar menyuluh ke langit (pp. 126-171). Singapura: Universiti Teknologi Nanyang.

Ommundsen, W. (2011). Sex in the global city: Chick-lit with a difference. Contemporary Women's Writing 5(2), 107-124.

Sew, J.W. (2010). Persembahan@Media.com. Kuala Lumpur: Universiti Malaya Press.

Sew, J.W. (2014). Going bananas. Grammar Gang, 1 February.  http://thegrammargang.blogspot.sg/2014/02/going-bananas-with-green-tomatoes.html

Jyh Wee Sew
Centre for Language Studies, Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences, National University of Singapore

Reading at three in a multilingual society

Jia Yi Chee is a three year-old girl born in January, 2010. She is the youngest growing up with three elder brothers. Literally speaking, she comes from a working class as both her parents are working full time, although her mother drives Jia Yi to school before work every morning. After the domestic helper left the family, Sheena, Jia Yi’s mother chose to put her daughter on a full day child care system. Currently, Jia Yi attends a multilingual childcare facility six days per week in the multilingual Pekan Nenas, a town in the state of Johor, south of the Peninsular Malaysia.

                                                                 Jia Yi (posing for iPhone)

Among other things, Jia Yi has received books and a few sets of mono-word card after six months attending the childcare facility. In between dinner and breakfast, Jia Yi watches a lot of English and Mandarin cartoons on television. Television, once-called the idiot-box, is a surrogate baby-sitter.  Despite her ritual television viewing, Jia Yi enjoys reading. Her reading stimulations are the word cards, which display words in English, Malay and Mandarin that are arranged in random order. The following are her progressive reading outcomes based on selected word cards as her mental stimulants:

Reading stimulants	Jia Yi’s reading output
Bantal	bantal (pillow in Malay)
学 Xué	*tóng > xué (learn in Mandarin)
Scissors	scissor [sic]
love	love
女Nǚ	nǚ (female in Mandarin)
Skirt	skirt
Luka	luka (scar in Malay)
You	you
eye	eyes [sic]
Play	play
Towel	*mouth > I don’t know (in Mandarin) > towel (upon correction)
I	saya, wo, I (upon correction)
Pagi	pagi
Seluar (pants)	*selamat > *beautiful (with a smile) > seluar (upon correction)
Kasut	kasut (shoes in Malay)
Morning	morning
Kawan (friend)	*friend, *pen yu > kawan (upon correction)
Baju	baju (shirt in Malay)
Toothbrush	toothbrush
Girl	girl
Milk	milk
爸bà    (father)	ba ba (wrong tone in Standard Mandarin; correct colloquially)
Feel	*Fail > *fail (with a smile) > feel (upon correction)
开kāi	kai (open in Mandarin)
心Xīn	xin (heart in Mandarin)
Perempuan	Perempuan (women in Malay)
Mouth	mouth
Saya	saya (I in Malay)

Table 1: A three year-old’s reading output in a multilingual society

                                                Jia Yi's favourite reading area (in front of the TV)

Initially, prior to the outcomes in Table 1, Jia Yi used to read in phrases: “I love you” for the word love, “good morning” for the word morning, má má for the mono-syllable word mother 妈 in Mandarin. Jia Yi has eventually corrected her reading output by tailoring it to a word-by-word reading pattern. This seems more like a reading detour if we believe that language development is not a word-based transformation.  Depending on one’s preference, one may look at formulaic language as part of psycholinguistic development (Alison Wray), emergentism (William O'Grady), nonlineal parallel processing as a state of mind (cf. Naomi Goldblum, among others), form-function construction as the cognitive process for language (Adele Goldberg), or core syntactic properties shared by human languages (Noam Chomsky) as our reference point(s).

The reading outputs contained in Table 1 were observed and recorded by the blogger who held the word card to Jia Yi’s face. The blogger said yes/good if Jia Yi has read correctly, nope if she has read wrongly, and offered the ‘accurate’ pronunciation if she has read the word on the card wrong for twice.

                                               Jia Yi before watching a movie on a Friday evening

What is interesting is that Jia Yi has recurrent difficulties with verb-to-be such as /are/ in a different observation and personal pronoun /I/ compared to nouns such as /scissors/. She uses any of the three languages as a basis of her reading knowledge and attempts to correct herself in two other languages. Jia Yi mimics the pronunciation of a word in a third language when she receives a correction in a third language.

Based on the simple reading interaction with Jia Yi, there are four questions that this blog post would like to raise as its concluding remarks. Firstly, is word-for-word the right way to adopt in teaching reading to preschools? Secondly, do the children growing up reading in a multilingual setting require different sets of learning materials compared to the children growing up reading and learning in monolingual setting? Thirdly, should language learning begin with one language per each contact time in a multilingual setting, if not across all the learning settings? Lastly, do the language educators and policy planners understand the difference between children coordinating multilingual stimulations and children receiving monolingual stimulations well enough when they manage language acquisition in general and plan reading practice in particular?

 

Jyh Wee Sew

Centre for Language Studies

Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences

National University of Singapore

On the fat road

Like many Malay words, the word fat in English is bi-categorical in terms of grammar. This means that fat may be considered as an adjective as well as a noun. The examples to illustrate the adjectival and nominal status of fat are as follows:

Her second husband is a very fat man vs. There is plenty of fat in this piece of fried chicken.

http://www.rahsiaslimdiet.com/2012/11/alpha-lipid-sd2-cara-kuruskan-badan.html

Interestingly, the word fat may become metaphorical in the following phrases:

Fat-phrases	Metaphorical Meaning
Fat cheque	A draft worth plenty of money issuable by the bank
Fat chance	Unlikely
Fat hope	Wishful thinking
A fat lot of good use	Neither good nor useful at all
It’s not over until the fat lady sings	The outcome of a situation is not yet final

In comparison, the word jalan in Malay may refer to the verb walk as well as the noun road. Here is a contrastive comparison of jalan as verb and noun in separate syntactic contexts:

Rumah itu di tepi jalan besar         vs.   Jangan jalan ke hadapan lagi

(That house is by the main road)           (Don’t walk forward any more)

http://www.johor-properties.com/2011/11/johor-bahru-development-land-for-sale-at-rm260/






Along the vein of non-literal expression, /jalan/ may be metaphorical in these Malay constructions:

Jalan-phrases	Meaning
Jalan (road) buntu (deadlocked)	Dead end (mental block) vs. jalan mati [die] (dead end )
Jalan (road) pendek (short)	Shortcut / cutting corner
Jalan (road) cerita (story)	Plot
Jalan (road) belakang (back)	Unorthodox way
Jalan (road) damai (peace)	Solution for peace
Jalan (road) serong (slanted)	Unscrupulous approach

It is obvious why many people would want a fat bank account but a fat-free diet, indicating that we are constantly in a love-hate relationship with fat. Similarly, in the Malay world, everybody would like to find their path to attaining success although sometimes one may be tempted to select the shorter route as there is certainly more than one road to Rome, as the Chinese saying would have it. By comparison, the English expression is that all roads lead to Rome, putting a different slant on the meaning.

This article suggests that words are always inbuilt with a potential to generate many types of references offering a variety of meanings for the speakers to select and combine in verbal communication. It is because of the versatility of each word in producing different types of reference that we are spared the trouble of creating a new word for every single denotation, keeping the linguistic stock within a manageable mental portfolio for expression and interaction.

Jyh Wee Sew
Centre for Language Studies
Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences
National University of Singapore