Month: October 2014

In establishing the category long-term English learner, a research report titled Reparable Harm was the most influential. Positioned as a “wake-up call” for educators and policy makers in California about the number of students who still remain classified as English learners after many years of study in California schools, the report called for explicit action by identifying “promising practices” and providing suggestions for district and system level reform (Olsen iii). The label, in particular, provided a “generative metaphor” (Schön) that resonated with legislators and other state stakeholders as a conceptualization of an existing social problem in need of a solution. It was well received in context a in which the public discourse reflected a growing concern about immigration policy, an unease about the racial and ethnic composition of the state (e.g., Hanson), and an actual set of educational challenges.

This specific example of the construction of categories and labels matters because it is a clear example of how coexisting discourses and language ideologies provide a set of cultural rules, conditions, practices, and power relations (Chilton; Goodwin and Duranti; Lindstrom; Van Dijk, “Contextual Knowledge Management” and “Discourse”) that lead to the uncritical acceptance and reification of those categories. More important for this essay, it calls attention to the politics of language in educational contexts in this particularly vulnerable period of time in which economic, political, educational, and theoretical shifts intersect with mass migratory flows. We focus here briefly on two shifts.

The first involves the global education reform movement, termed GERM by Pasi Sahlberg, a Finnish scholar. This movement involves international test comparisons like the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) and Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study and emphasizes the knowledge economy, competition-based education, standardized testing, and the evaluation of teacher effectiveness. According to Sahlberg, GERM is threatening even those countries, like Finland, where what matters most is good schools for all children. PISA, a single, two-hour examination that evaluates education systems worldwide by testing the knowledge of fifteen-year-old students, is a key part of this global effort at standardized educational reform. Each PISA report and rankings provokes either delight or debates and concerns about the quality of education in participating countries. Not surprisingly, in this competition-based context, immigrant status and language background of students and their effects on standardized scores are being carefully analyzed (e.g., Strong Performers; Christensen and Stanat; Thomson et al.; Knighton, Brochu, and Gluszynski). Among the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries, for example, the United States has the sixth largest proportion of students with an immigrant background. But the share of students with an immigrant background explains just four percent of the performance variation between countries. Despite having large proportions of immigrant students, some countries, like Canada, perform above the OECD average. Immigrants, however, and their language proficiency are a source of increasing concern in many nations.

The second shift involves language itself. The terrain has changed rapidly in applied linguistics. Currently, there are many theoretical debates in the field of second language acquisition (SLA). What have been termed “the social turn” (Block) and “the multilingual turn” (May) in that field, for example, have raised the following fundamental questions:

• What needs to be acquired in SLA?
• Should an implicit linguistic system be acquired or a set of structures and forms, or both the system and the set? Or is only the ability to use the second language (L2) effectively important?
• How are second languages acquired?
• Is SLA an individual cognitive process through which individuals move in similar ways? Is it a process of getting the bits and pieces and conforming more and more to a uniform target language (as spoken by idealized native speakers)? Or is SLA “a mediated, social semiotic activity” (Kramsch 97) that results from experience and use?
• What is the end state of SLA?
• Is native-like mastery or complete acquisition of the target language possible? Does SLA result in two full language systems kept separate in use? Does it lead to the development of plurilingualism (Beacco)—that is, of the ability of people to use more than one language in social communication, whatever their command of those languages might be—or of linguistic repertoires that grow and change to meet communicative needs without reaching, as Diane Larsen-Freeman suggests (“Second Language Acquisition”), a native-like endpoint or ultimate attainment?

In the field of SLA and applied linguistics, there is increasing agreement on the following points: SLA is a highly variable and individual process. It is not linear. The highest attainment for most L2 learners does not result in monolingual-like language, even when an L2 is acquired by very young children (Ortega). Teaching may not cause learning (Larsen-Freeman, “Standards”).

Immigrant linguistic-minority students, across the world, must acquire a majority-societal language, whether in a monolingual, bilingual, or multilingual program. In an era of global educational reform, there are increasingly serious consequences, from this pressure, to official language-learner categories. The categories draw from and contribute to the public perception of immigrant students, help or hinder their educational success, and shape the policies that regulate their educational trajectories. Seemingly neutral and commonsense descriptions of student characteristics can have a great effect on the academic lives of youngsters who are sorted in ways that limit their access to opportunities and resources (see Callahan; Xiong and Zhou).

Labels in education, moreover, are problematic. Raymond McDermott warns us that we must be concerned about labels that fundamentally work to keep people in their place and serve as display boards for all the contradictions of school systems and language teaching programs around the world. An established category in a school setting will produce a certain student body. Ours is an era of standardized tests not only in mathematics, reading, and science but also in language proficiency—in particular, the progress of children acquiring the societal language is assessed.

But this assessment is a complicated and difficult endeavor. As Glenn Fulcher and Fred Davidson contend, the practice of language testing “makes an assumption that knowledge, skills and abilities are stable and can be ‘measured’ or ‘assessed.’ It does it in full knowledge that there is error and uncertainty” and strives to make “the extent of the error and uncertainty transparent” (2). In recent years, there has been an increasing concern in the language-testing profession about the degree to which that uncertainty is made transparent to test users at all levels as well as to the general public. Elana Goldberg Shohamy has raised a number of important issues about ethics and fairness of language testing with reference to language policy. Attention has been given to the effect of high-stakes tests, to the uses of language tests for the management of language-related issues in many national settings (Spolsky), and to the special challenges of standards-based testing (Cumming; Hudson). Alister Cumming makes a strong statement about the conceptual foundations of language assessments:

A major dilemma for comprehensive assessments of oracy and literacy are the conceptual foundations on which to base such assessments. On the one hand, each language assessment asserts, at least implicitly, a certain conceptualization of language and of language acquisition by stipulating a normative sequence in which people are expected to gain language proficiency with respect to the content and methods of the test. On the other hand, there is no universally agreed upon theory of language or of language acquisition nor any systematic means of accounting for the great variation in which people need, use, and acquire oral and literate language abilities. (10)

This dilemma notwithstanding, educational systems develop their own sets of standards. These standards, developed as part of a policy-making consensus process, are generally based on the professional perspectives of educators or on the personal experiences and views of other members of standards-writing committees and not on empirical evidence or on SLA theories. Cumming points out that this approach involves a logical circularity, because what learners are expected to learn is defined by the standards, taught or studied in the curriculum, and then assessed “in reference to the standards, as a kind of achievement testing.” He cautions that the applications of such assessments “should not be misinterpreted as evaluations of proficiency or competency generally or by extension to contexts other than the curriculum standards or local educational conditions” (11).

According to Cumming, language proficiency assessments, as currently constructed, tell us very little about a student’s proficiency in a second language. They tell us only where a student scores with reference to the hypothesized sequence of development on which the assessment is based. Such scores are useful in that they allow educators to classify and categorize students and, in theory, to provide them with appropriate instructional support as the students acquire the societal language. Many would argue that in this imperfect world our educational systems are doing the best they can.

Given our growing concern today about classifications and categorizations such as so-called long-term English learners (Olsen), we should examine the politics of language that results in the labeling and categorization of immigrant students, whose number has greatly increased in an era of mass migration. We should consider what Ellen Bialystok, one of the most distinguished researchers on child bilingualism in the world, and Kathleen Peets have to say about categorizations:

Our ordinary conversational means for describing people’s language experience perpetuates a fiction so compelling that we accept the description as a meaningful category. We talk as though being bilingual, or being a language learner, or being literate in a language is an identifiable state with objective criteria and stable characteristics. Our faith in these descriptions as reliable and valid categories extends to education, where such categories are used to classify children and place them in various instructional programs, and to research, where experimental designs are built around the objective of uncovering the unique profile for members of the respective categorical groups. Practically, these approaches are useful and allow educational practice and research inquiry to proceed, producing outcomes that are largely positive. Theoretically, however, the categories are elusive, with individual variation within a category sometimes as great as that between two individuals in different categories. (134)

We are required by existing policy mandates to identify and classify immigrant students as second-language learners. The assumption is that accurate language categorizations can be created and students identified who fit into them. If Bialystok and Peets are correct, however, much harm can come to students if we expect consistent growth and development even though growth and development are known to be highly variable among learners, if we create language ghettos from which students cannot exit and, more important, in which they cannot develop their minds. In times of mass migration and movement of peoples, positive forms of social cohesion should be promoted, diverse groups should be integrated, and peace in the world should be secured. Developing the next generation of minds must be a fundamental goal for all educators.

[C]oming out of a generally conservative climate into the liberal university, bright students can develop their “critical-thinking” skills in ways useful to business and government so long as they don’t think too critically for too long—something that corporate elites do not appear to be concerned will happen. They know that professors are small fish in a very big pond.

We need a mind-set change, what in my typically turgid way I have called “imaginative training for epistemological performance” (122). We need to think ourselves differently so that we act differently. We are the custodians of the only weapon not for social change but life survival: language, definitively also and always vulnerable. We need to change the minds of the policy makers.

Language is vulnerable under globalization; there is loss of connection with the mother tongue unless its class of speakers happens to be globally viable. I want to share with you what I discussed with Hassanat Balogun Bello just before our session at the MLA. She is a young woman who is a systems analyst at a small new rural Nigerian university. To her I said that what has been seen as a disadvantage—Africa’s wealth of languages unsystematized by the missionaries—should be rethought as an advantage and then push, push, push for resources.

Easier said than done. The donor agencies still feel that Africa should receive only top-down health and welfare needs, involving the communities without engaging anything but self-interest, solving problems for economic verification on the development model. Higher education reinforces the old class structures. Primary education makes no attempt to tune itself to damaged epistemes.

In one of her preparatory e-mails for our session, Guadalupe Valdés wrote, “Much harm is done to children in the name of language pedagogy.” Brava. I believe she was speaking of the first preparation of the human mind, passed on from generation to generation, so that it can use the technological “setting to work” of science for the betterment of the world, so that citizens’ resistance does not stop with either inconsequential violence or, at the other extreme, the development of tool kits by intellectuals organic to capitalist globalization in their worship of the digital.

Intellectual labor begins with the training of children, slowly. It has been abundantly demonstrated that an at least bilingual primary education not only lays the foundation for learning other languages (including mathematics, digitality, and the like) but also connects the world of social justice and social welfare with the earliest stages of a child’s development. The “global” languages are first language to only a part of the world. It is only that part that has an intrinsic connection to a “global” language. Speakers whose first language is not “global”—and we are talking race, class, and gender here—suffer a loss of connection with their infancy language, and this loss is ethical and as significant as climate change for the world’s future.

In this connection, and because Africa is taken never as a model—the United States local is always offered as the global—but only as vulnerable, I refer to an Africa-led project that believes that in order to build human capital on an unprecedentedly broad basis, the wealth of mother tongues unsystematized by colonialism must be seized for direct phonetic digitalization. Here the digital can partner its prefiguration in the oral, bypassing the existential impoverishment of the codification practiced in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This project will not compete with the established usefulness of the great African languages—Swahili, Yoruba, Wolof, Xhosa, and so on. It will not impede access to global English. It will rather provide an altogether firmer basis for democratic popular education. There is an urgent need at this historical moment to seize these resilient languages as survivors rather than endangered. This is altogether different from the necessary work of preservation, which must focus on endangered languages. The project uses advanced information technology for the democratic development and interlinking of community and civil society as well as further research for posttertiary education in Africa and the rest of the world through the resources of still undocumented but socially viable mother tongues. It will demonstrate that, from infancy through advanced education, it is the mother tongue that remains fundamental. The tracks set down by these languages across the length and breadth of continental Africa—because you cannot tell the outlines of named languages, as Suresh Canagarajah pointed out—will strengthen the African unity that is most urgently required as the continent achieves higher human-development indexes. Since these languages are spoken by poor and rich, uneducated and educated alike—and the project intends to sustain that double focus—it is hoped that the divided polity will heal as a result of this project.

As we were planning our session together, Mary Louise Pratt sent us a fantastic item from the Guardian, commenting on the closing down of language departments in the United States and in Britain. That is the fight in the trenches, where I do engage. We do not hesitate to find a reason for language training in the United States Department of Defense. Anthony Grafton’s excellent “Humanities in Dubious Battle” belongs here (Grafton and Grossman). But at the Presidential Forum we have the opportunity to think in the long term. To think a somewhat utopian future and affirm that the world’s wealth of languages is a way to survival—and not simply see ourselves as helping through policy to save endangered and vulnerable languages or even language departments.

On the subject of not having access to the sources of power: I have become a member of the Global Agenda Council on Values of the World Economic Forum. Believe me, these are people of goodwill. And they can make changes, because they not only have the ear of policy makers but are themselves policy makers. Yet the greatest goodwill can be hindered by a knowledge-management approach: putting limits on what counts as language (as Canagarajah points out) and offering tool kits. That hindrance is shared by us, however politically correct we may be about the World Economic Forum and however predictably ecstatic about the World Social Forum, when we, denying our complicity, offer basically the same panacea. What I have learned is that social justice builds itself on all children’s, and therefore all people’s, capacity to use the right to intellectual labor, not just on the ease and speed of their learning.

One of the problems with tool kits is that they make teaching “easier.” Far away from radical solidarity tourism, teachers of language, as well as the teachers of literature from whom they are hierarchically separated, no longer confront the challenge of the unexpected. We might want to remember that the teachability of literature is not only in the categorizability of literature but also in the fact that literature can open us to a contingency that escapes all knowledge management. I am not a Romantic. I certainly do not suggest that we go back to the primitivism of emoting over global communities that I witness at many international conferences where I am invited because I am seen as a poco person. We want to combat orthodox linguistics and anthropology, which are colonial disciplines, in the same way that I am trying to combat from the inside the transformation of the discipline of literary reading into something colonial as it allows itself to be quantified instead of rising to the insistent defense of the humanities as instrument and weapon.

We are not primarily artists or philosophers at this convention but teachers of the humanities. It is our task always to work for the future of humankind. This is what Adrienne Rich described, already in 1977, as “an ethical and intellectual contract between teacher and student” (231). Our primary instrument of ethical preparation is language teaching.

My message to Bartolovich, with whom I am in solidarity since the early 1980s: get out of the acceptance of powerlessness as normal, stop us-and-them-ing, acknowledge complicity, and act the conjuncture.

Not everyone thinks that Cree, an Algonquian language now spoken by around a hundred thousand people across the Canadian north, is going to disappear, but Highway, a playwright, novelist, concert pianist, composer, librettist, performance artist, and humorist, does.2 He has made it a challenge of his life and work to live his place in that losing fully and consciously and convey its force and depth to others.3 One of his prized tools is laughter. Chuckles, playfulness, and silly jokes punctuated his speech, intercepting nostalgia, sentimentality, and rage (though not grief). Cree, he said, is “the world’s funniest language”; it arose from “the laughter of a cosmic clown.” In his Encuentro keynote, he sought to break the imaginative quarantine on language loss through the powers of the fully fluent, accomplished native speaker who is able, as he put it, to “dig his way through the warp and weave” of the doomed language still so fully alive in and for himself. In the course of conveying the social and imaginative stakes in the disappearance of Cree, he performed a response to another question: By what science of dwelling can a fluent native speaker inhabit a vulnerable language in love, joy, and plenitude, knowing that its life is finite as her or his own?4 How is such a losing to be lived?

Highway began with geography, a gigantic, resplendent satellite image of the Canadian north on a twenty-foot screen, without which, none of us would understand anything he was going to say. This is a world of “mind-boggling vastness . . . that none of you knows anything about.” Nunavut, sweeping across the screen, is the size of all of western Europe, including Scandinavia, with a population of 35,000.5 Imagine France, with only a thousand people (chuckles, scattered applause). Growing up in his part of the world, on the border of Manitoba and Nunavut, meant having fifty lakes, not a few meters of beach, all to yourself. The Cree language he learned growing up in the 1950s was embedded in the geography, ecology, and isolation of this region; its cosmologies were constructed in and on that place, reproduced there through generations of native speakers alongside Dene, an even more ancient language of the region. Many people learned both. Nobody around him spoke French or English.

Jorge Luis Borges in his brief text “The Witness” imagines the death of “the last man who has seen the face of Woden.” Highway wanted his audience not just to imagine the last person on earth who dreams in Cree but also to imagine Cree, to attend to its gifts, its rhythm and design. “Pay attention,” he said, “this won’t come your way again.” He conjugated verbs—to breathe, to suffer, to stink or go sour, subjunctives included. He offered the word for skirt, coded as “dress cut in half.” One, two, three skirts. With hilarity, he described the ritual of the Hail Mary contest: a whole village on its knees in the main street, rosaries rattling in hands. With a starting pistol the priest kicks off the competition to see who can say the rosary the fastest, in Cree. Highway performed it, awarded himself the prize (more laughter and applause). He gave us a sentence that, in a room full of Cree speakers, always triggers instant hilarity. In English it means (merely), “Who just came in the door?” We laughed, imagining how this could indeed always be funny.

Then he got down to the serious business of semantic design. Speakers of European languages do not and cannot know, he said, what it is like to be formed by a language that has no grammatical gender. Or what it is like to then discover that the languages of power around you all divide the world into two, and only two, genders, one subordinated to the other. European languages are “obsessed with gender,” a trait connected for him with Judeo-Christianity’s “monotheistic, phallic superstructure,” which has no room for a female divine or for a capacious multiplicity of genders that does not pit one against the other.6

In Cree, as in other Amerindian languages, the key grammatical distinction is between things that are animate, endowed with soul or spirit, and things that are not. In Cree, Highway explained, the former are marked by the prefix aná-, the latter by the prefix animá-. As with grammatical gender, the distinction sometimes seems arbitrary but often is not. For example, the processing of raw materials into usable products involves a shift from having spirit to not having it. The word for cow is marked as animate; steak is cow inanimate. The word for tree carries the marker for animacy; chair is the same word, but marked for inanimacy or absence of spirit. So a chair is a tree that has had its soul or spirit removed. Likewise, the word for rock carries the animacy or spirit marker; cement or sidewalk is the same word but with the inanimacy marker. Processed or manufactured objects, in other words, are coded as inanimate or despirited versions of their animate raw materials, as something like the afterlives of the things they were made from (those are my words, not Highway’s). The distinction does not carry a negative valence but rather marks a transformation from one form of energy to another. Dead or deanimated things remain among us in different form. The live body, of course, is animate, but individual body parts—leg, hand, head—are marked as without spirit or animacy. There are three exceptions, however: the vagina, the womb, and the anus, all coded as having life and spirit of their own. The first two are capacious spaces of life, the third the birthplace of the trickster and laughter, enabling Cree, said Highway, to conceive of “a female god who laughs and laughs and laughs.”

“Don’t let these ideas upset you,” he said. Cree is a disappearing language, and this is “the last gasp,” “the Goddess’s farewell tour . . . a chance to say farewell to an idea that might have worked at one time in history.” At the same time, he demanded an afterlife: “The time has come to listen to other people’s sacred stories. . . . We need to allow our languages to lead us back to the garden and make the serpent speak to the man and not the woman.” We ought to see to it, in other words, that Cree passes on some of its transformative semantic powers: the power to “bend the straight line of the phallic into the circle of the ionic,” which has space for everything; the power to give nature back its soul; the chance to ditch the story of expulsion from the garden and of entitlement to domination of the nonhuman world. What we might want to call exit routes from Western humanism (again, my words, not Highway’s).

Highway’s garden is already in flames. As oxygen-depleting forest fires, driven by insect plagues and drought, increasingly devour the north and move down toward southern cities like Montreal, the long last gasps of Cree will merge into what are increasingly likely to be the long last gasps of carbon-based life on the planet. If, as now seems inevitable, the unfolding “environmental catastrophe of capitalism” (Povinelli, “Geontologies”) makes living loss into a core experience, unevenly distributed, of every remaining generation of living creatures, the matter of how to live the losing becomes a central social and imaginative challenge to human existence. Developing that sad new science of dwelling, clear-eyed, in the remains of the garden, is going to call for the powers and wisdom of the cosmic clown, the goddess who laughs and laughs.

Development Discourses

As it is now widely recognized, talented professionals from less developed communities are migrating in large numbers to developed countries for higher education, professional training, and employment. Though this kind of migration used to be treated as contributing to “brain drain” a few decades ago (Bhagwati and Partington), the discourse has shifted to “brain gain” now (Kuznetsov 221). Policy makers argue that professional migration is a win-win situation for both the sending and receiving countries: the West benefits from the migrants who come to develop its technology and economy, and the less developed countries benefit through the remittances, investment in economic enterprises, and direct engagement by the migrants in the improvement of their towns and villages. This reasoning exemplifies the neoliberal orientation to development. The Washington consensus (representing the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the United States Treasury) holds that market forces will ensure economic benefits for all parties if national borders are opened to facilitate the free flow of resources and labor (Harvey 1–4).

Many aspects of the neoliberal discourse need to be critiqued, but I focus here on its implications for communication. A key feature of the discourse is flexibility (Holborrow 43). It is argued that professional migrants have to be flexible to communicate effectively in other languages as they shuttle across national borders to fill different jobs in the fluid labor market we find today. Many policy makers and employment agencies believe that flexibility is ensured by the sharing of a common language. If everyone uses lingua franca English, the argument goes, communication becomes more efficient (Cameron). The expectation of uniformity in communication is so strong that policy makers are using fewer and fewer tests to assess the proficiency of professional migrants. The IELTS (International English Language Testing System) claims that about nine thousand organizations worldwide use its English test to make hiring decisions (www.ielts.org/about_us.aspx), and four countries (the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand) officially use its scores for immigration purposes. Though the IELTS claims that it is democratic in accommodating all the native-speaker varieties in its construction of tests, this accommodation does not go far enough when one considers that professional migrants bring with them varieties of English whose grammars have been nativized as well. Also, though the IELTS test includes all four language skills (speaking, listening, reading, writing), it focuses on form and therefore doesn’t address the discourses and interactional strategies that professionals practice in specific work settings.

Policy discourses and assessment practices like those of the IELTS convey a clear message to sending countries about human capital development. The countries now stress the teaching of English, and this emphasis makes their local languages vulnerable. Applied linguists have recently reported on language policies in various countries where English is gaining more prominence in local educational systems, displacing local languages (for the Philippines, see Lorente; for South Korea, see Piller and Cho). Ian Martin observes:

The Philippine government’s formula for economic success has become painfully simplistic: English equals money. Whether Filipino graduates are capable of critical and creative thinking, or have acquired basic life skills other than language skills, does not seem to be a major concern. The Philippine government’s language policies seem to be fixated on English alone. (194)

Portrait of a Professional Migrant

In this context of neoliberal discourses on development, communicative flexibility, and language efficiency, I introduce a professional migrant as an illustration. Busie, a health-care worker from Zimbabwe, is among about 160 professional migrants my colleagues and I have interviewed as part of an international collaborative research project to understand the migrants’ notions of communicative flexibility and efficiency (see www.migrationstudiesproject.psu.edu/projects.shtml for descriptions of the research projects at Penn State).1 Busie is currently a nurse in Leeds. Since she comes from a country where sixteen languages are official, her strategy for developing communicative flexibility is to expand her repertoire. She speaks Zimbabwean English, Shona, Tonga, and Xhosa and is unable to choose one of them as her mother tongue or native language. Though she doesn’t claim advanced proficiency in all four skills in some languages, since she uses them only for specific functions, she considers all of them native. She doesn’t claim much proficiency in other local languages, such as Chewa, Venda, and Tswana, but she has enough competence to borrow phrases and words from those languages and embed them in her discourse to establish solidarity with interlocutors who speak them. There is a third form of language practice, different from this code switching and code mixing, that she has adopted in communicative situations where no language is shared among the interlocutors: each speaker uses his or her own language—such as Afrikaans, Koisan, and Shona in a recent conversation Busie recounted—and communication is still achieved. This success is possible because each speaker has the receptive proficiency to understand the other’s language. Our researcher appeared skeptical, but Busie kept repeating, “It is not abnormal.” This conversational practice has emerged as sufficiently common in multilingual communities for applied linguists to give it the label “polyglot dialog” (Posner)—that is, one conversation in many languages.

These rich language practices become irrelevant when Busie and other Zimbabweans go to school, because schooling in their country is conducted almost entirely in English from the fourth grade on. Busie has mixed feelings about this language policy. On the one hand, the language practices she develops outside school are sadly ignored in the school curriculum and not developed further. On the other hand, it is the focus on English that enabled her to migrate to the United Kingdom as a professional. She stated, “[The fact that Zimbabwe is] a former British colony and the fact that our education was in English of course gave me and others who came [to Leeds] massive confidence, given that our training and education was modeled on the British system. It is because I spoke the language that I chose to come here.”

Despite this exclusive emphasis on English in her school education, Busie feels vulnerable in her workplace communication in the United Kingdom. The language used in her work is grammatically close to British English. Signs of her Zimbabwean English or evidence of code mixing or switching into other languages can actually be punished. Busie said:

You have to speak the language, otherwise you end up being reported to the Nursing and Midwifery Council for misconduct. In this country, the patients have too many rights; they get you suspended just by reporting that you spoke in another language that they didn’t understand. I know so many people, including Zimbabweans, who were charged with misconduct just for talking in their language, you know. The managers, when they are looking for someone to promote, it’s about how good is your English instead of how good is your practice. . . . Otherwise despite your qualifications you will die in the same band [rank] and as a simple nurse instead of where your performance and qualifications merit.

This professional vulnerability is taking its toll on her language repertoire. She is experiencing some language attrition, which is affecting her ability to engage in development activity back home. She travels periodically to Zimbabwe to participate in health education campaigns with nongovernmental organizations in the country. Recently, when she visited what she referred to as her mother’s village (her father’s village apparently communicates in a different language), she was dismayed to find that she had lost the fluency to conduct conversations in Ndebele. She had to use a translator to help her conduct work in that village. She had forgotten the names of some local herbs people find useful for food and medicine, names that didn’t exist in English and couldn’t be translated easily. This communicative deficiency affected her credibility and her ability to establish an insider identity with the villagers; it made her less effective. Her reflection on her language loss was pithy: “I lost [the language] while perfecting my Standard English.”

But her multilingual learning strategies are resilient. She continues to expand her linguistic repertoire in migrant settings. She explained how she communicates with fellow nurses from India and the Philippines—behind the backs of her British employers. Each nurse uses a different variety of English (Indian English, Filipino English, Zimbabwean English) without the need to share a homogeneous language. This practice is a continuation of the polyglot dialogue described above: a new context requires a new repertoire. Busie told us that many of her patients come to the hospital with little proficiency in English or with proficiency in a variety of English that native English speakers don’t accept, so she makes use of the polyglot strategy with her patients too. The strategy also holds possibilities for resistance in her place of work: with it, the nurses establish an in-group identity, share information to help them cope with the stresses of their work, and collaborate in opposing unfair employment conditions. The use of local languages, she said, was important to the nurses for the success of their work, helping them tap into a healthy work ethic and relationships, whereas the insistence on Standard English imposed a functional professional identity and values that reduced their work to meaningless labor.

Busie went on to reflect on why her understanding of communicative flexibility was different from that of her employers. She attributed her language practices to her socialization in a multilingual community. That community endowed her with a different disposition:

One thing I have realized personally for a while is that I always loved, maybe because I grew up in a multilingual society, where you always knew there [were] other languages all around you. And so you had a way of opening up to other things. I have a feeling that it is easier for us to translate and become something else and understand. But native speakers tend to be so unique . . . [they] just want one language and to sound one way.

Reflecting with her, we ask if such a disposition is developed because Busie and her compatriots cannot be in control of their communicative encounters when they live in a setting with multiple languages. Speakers of a minority language, also, are used to being compelled to adjust to the expectations of majority and privileged language speakers. Their vulnerability encourages them to collaborate with others, to develop tolerance, patience, and openness. Conversely, those who favor homogeneous communities or those in power are used to being in control of the communicative situation. Their refusal or inability to be vulnerable makes them less tolerant; they define reductively what counts as language—in other words, a language that approximates the norms of their own.

Implications

If we are to realize the vision of development discourses that professional migration be a win-win situation, we must move toward a broader notion of what is acceptable as language. Reductive language ideologies, and migration policies and assessment tools based on them, are leading to the vulnerability of local languages, in which proficiency is important for development work in local communities. Busie’s loss of her mother’s tongue diminished her ability to conduct her health literacy work. A multilingual repertoire facilitates professional relationships and services in developed communities as well. More important, language resources have implications for environmental sustainability. Not knowing the names of local herbs for medicinal purposes can lead to a loss of information about allopathic medicine and healthy dietary practices and thus a neglect of these plants. From this perspective, language is not merely a medium for migrant work relationships and knowledge transfer; it is central to the promotion of a balanced and sustainable development. Instead of being obsessed with the profitability of professional migration (as indicated by the World Bank’s publication of an annual remittance report; see Aga, Eigen-Zucchi, Plaza, and Silwal), we should develop a more expansive concept of development, one that accommodates the development of language resources people bring with them.

Let us examine critically the relation of language to different models of development. New studies on resilience show that organizations and organisms built on monoplex factors (i.e., unitary and uniform foundations for the sake of efficiency) cannot withstand shock and so are vulnerable. Organization and organisms that are multiplex and ecological, drawing from diverse influences and being embedded in them, are more resilient (see Gunderson, Allen, and Holling; Zolli and Healey). The implications for language policies are clear. The current development discourses that promote homogeneity, monolingualism, and a functional orientation to language represent a form of development that is vulnerable.

The moral of Busie’s narrative is not that individual languages should be preserved. The notion that languages are separate, having their own monolithic grammars and being bounded by specific communities and native speakers who possess those languages, is itself a recent reductive language ideology developed during modernity in the West (see Canagarajah). What Busie implicitly points to is not the vulnerability of individual languages but the vulnerability of language practices. She exemplifies the value of a plurilingual practice that draws its resources from different languages, enabling hybrid forms of communication that help her shuttle between different communities for her life and work.