Deconstructing Language Education

Sayyed Mohsen Fatemi, Ph.D.
University of British Columbia Continuing Studies
Athabasca University and Century College, Kingston College,
New York Institute of Technology (NYIT) and Pattison College.
E-mail: Sayyedmohsen.fatemi@ubc.ca

On a recent tour of Niagara Falls, I interviewed people at the site from all different walks of life, mainly North American with a variance of age, sex and education. As they were passing by the waterfalls, and the mist was running into their faces, I asked them to describe what was happening. Following are some of the answers that were given by people:

• The mist is annoying but the scene is beautiful.
• It is amazing!
• It is so powerful!
• Umm, well, it's beautiful.
• I cannot. I never thought about that.
• Oh, yeah. It is great!
• I can't.
• It makes me imagine things.
• I want to dance.
• Wow! Umm, it's amazing.
• I don't have words for it.
• Cool!
• I just know it's so beautiful.
• Oh, I don't know.

Immediate Consciousness

Immediate consciousness happens when people process information (about themselves or their emotions) mindfully and live in the present. The essence of immediate consciousness lies in people's immediate connection to themselves and their emotional state at the present time.

As the above answers suggest, all participants have described the end product of the event and not the event itself, in spite of the fact that I clearly asked them to describe what was happening and not the effect of what was happening. What does this suggest? The suggestion is that people, at least in this example, do not have immediate knowledge of what is happening around them. As far as the immediate consciousness is concerned, people usually overlook the immediacy due to their preoccupations, their association of ideas and their ensuing emotions and affects, and their lack of education in this respect. People may not be able to express the subject matter of their immediate, or direct, consciousness as they get detached from their mindfully living in the moment. In other words, they can't fully and immediately experience the moment since they are dragged to recall the past (memory and association of ideas) or they are tempted to dream of the future (prospective occupation of the mind). Above all, when people are not educated to direct consciousness, they cannot express (language) the experience of their immediate connection. If people are mainly detached from their immediate consciousness, they will not be expressive of the belongings of their immediate consciousness, namely what their direct knowledge and consciousness experience in particular instances.

Furthermore, if we give credit to the axiom that there is a relationship between expressiveness, expression, and thought, we may acknowledge that the more thinking is enhanced or enriched, expressivity can be improved. Accordingly, we may suggest that people who are devoid of an opulent imagination and may not express themselves fully. If people were not supposed to think beyond what ordinarily impels them to think, what would their language look like? If the mind is so intensively pre-occupied by one's memories, they will not be given a chance to experience immediate consciousness, as if they were not living in the moment. If education does not promote a focus on expressing the immediate consciousness and its ramifications, how do we expect to see creativity in thinking and in language? What happens if education encourages expressing (languaging) the immediate consciousness? What are the implications of having a shift from receptivity to proactivity (being intrinsically and essentially tied to immediate consciousness) in terms of expressiveness? Since the subject matter of the consciousness in its immediate representation is constantly varied and fresh, would we not most likely witness the freshness, newness and novelty in expressing through language those unique experiences of immediacy? Once people learn to mindfully live in the moment and actively connect to their direct consciousness of 'now', they can look into the unfamiliar as well. The novelty begins to emerge when the search for the unfamiliar amidst the familiar begins. This novelty is well cherished in the invaluable experience of immediate consciousness. If I solely focus on what already is (actualities), I may hardly look into what else could be or how otherwise this can be (potentialities). The less I explore the gift of otherwise, the more I would succumb to what it is i.e. the less I would go for creating what is not or what can be. If people learn to think profoundly and if they get educated to go beyond the predefined borders of languaging and thinking, what implications would this thinking bring in the realm of politics, social life, etc? What are the consequences, impacts and corollaries of meticulously languaging the immediate consciousness in respect to understanding the meaning of "I--ness," "self," "identity," and "self-concept"? [See Note 1] What would be the role of creativity and its influence on languaging the immediate consciousness? How can creative thinking be reinforced, bolstered and encouraged by virtue of a concentrated attention on languaging the immediate consciousness?

In order to present a more tangible and a more perceptible account of these questions and their etiological goal, a number of people may be selected for the following measurement. Fourteen people are asked to describe or express their immediate consciousness and their words are recorded. In the first stage, the number of words spoken by each person is counted. These numbers are placed in column 2 of Table A. Then the number of words spoken by the group will be totalled. This total is used as the basis for calculating the percentages in column 3. Column 3 should add up to 100 per cent.

Table A

To get a measure of the creative statements or the statements indicating the immediate consciousness of the person, we go over the recorded tape and identify all such statements. We, then, count the number of times that each person produced such modes of expressiveness and enter the number in column 2 of table B. Later, we total column 2 and use the total to calculate percentages for column 3. The percentages in column 3 should add up to 100 per cent.

Table B

In the third stage, we look at the receptive statements arising from the immediate consciousness. We count the number of such statements and enter the number for each person in column 2 of Table C. We then total column 2 and use the total to calculate the percentages for column 3. (The percentages in column 3 should add up to 100 per cent.)

Table C

Now, if we juxtapose these tables, we can look at spread. For example, we may calculate the number spread by subtracting the number of words spoken by the person who spoke least creatively from the person who spoke most creatively.

Representations and Obligations

While examining language education, we are unavoidably bound to address some fundamental and significant questions. Those questions are not merely those of methodology where one needs to apply the best method so that the learner can learn better and faster. We need to ask what are the goals of learning a language or a second language? What is it that we try to achieve? Depending on our perspective, our epistemological and our ontological systems, these questions will be answered in different ways. Our answers would reveal our paradigms and assumptions that play the most pivotal role in shaping our curriculum and policies. One may see the polemical questions and responses in this regard in the burgeoning discussions and studies in the field of ESL, which strongly challenge the previously accepted beliefs and approaches about language education. Some of these critiques come from the heart of the postmodern, feminist, critical applied linguistics, and political discourses. For example, Benesch, 1993, 2001; Canagarajah, 1996; Corson, 1997; Pennycook, 2000, 2001; Vandrick, 1994). There are also other perspectives such as the spiritual and aesthetic discourses that challenge the fundamental beliefs and approaches of language education and make a critique on the role, nature and dynamics of language education--Greene, 1993; Mendelsohn 1999; Vanlier, 2000.

Language education, whether for ESL or non-ESL, mainly lies on pre-established paradigms of language and education. This means that language education can vary if the perspectives on language and education change. The fundamentally significant questions of a language education program ultimately boil down to the following:

1. What is language? What is important to learn?
2. What is the goal of language? What is it that we can do through language?
3. What is the relationship between us as the user of language and the language that we use?

Discussing the relationship of imagination, communication and critique with education, for example, Snyder (2002) looks into a critical perspective and indicates that "we need to develop pedagogical and curriculum frameworks that seek to endow students with a sense of their place in the new global system, but also with the capacity to view that system critically. At the very least, we can help our students to engage in local forms of cultural critique" (181). Obviously, if the underlying paradigms are essentially embedded in certain epistemological and ontological positions, they will support nothing but what concurs with those underlying elements. For example, if thinking is subsumed only in certain predefined analytical and logical prose, which excludes narratives, then this perspective cannot appreciate narrative as a reflective and critical form of discourse. In such an epistemology, narrative is not an ontologically supportive element of thought. Language education, therefore, may not foster serious attempts to introduce narrative structures for the goal of language and thought education.

On the contrary, a more flexible system of epistemology where the ontological relationships can be sought in a broader perspective, and knowledge and rationality are not doomed to be circumvented in certain prescribed ways, multifarious and diverse specialized uses of language related to distinctive modes of thought are encouraged and supported. In such an epistemology, oral narratives, for example, are seen as rich and productive in relation to the demonstration of rationality and embodying a distinctive form of language and thought as other conventionally recognized traditions. Therefore, the question of language, literacy, writing, and education ultimately goes back to a question of epistemology and, more important than that, a question of ontology. Some questions on ontology include: What realms do exist for knowing in language education? What kinds of beings should be known? Some on epistemology include: What are the ways of knowing? What ways of knowing should we explore? These and questions such as: What is language? What is the goal of language learning? What do we want the language for? need to be examined in any program or project in a language education program. On the basis of these definitions and explanations, practical approaches are framed, promoted and approved. [See Note 2]

The conductors of language education in ESL, for example, write curriculum and educational programs for learners in accordance with their pre-established models and formulations which prescribe attention towards certain aspects of language. An ESL student who is learning English as a new language needs to abide by not only the regulations, being less disputable in the realm of grammar, vocabulary, etc., but also the discourse(s) through which the regulations are expressed. If we assume that those discourses are predominantly ordinary discourses, what will be the chance of a learner's acquaintance with the non-ordinary discourse? What are the consequences of mere emphasis on ordinary discourse in terms of thinking? If the learners are only to focus on strings of "what they should say" and "what they should not" in order to pass TOEFL, CBAT, etc., and if they only concentrate on the actualized patterns of expressivity within the promoted models, can they ever express other various modes of thoughts and expressiveness?

Once they learn a new language such as English, learners also face the identification of correlation, relationship, connectedness and interconnectedness of not only semiotics (signs) of the language but also the semantics (meanings) within the language. Therefore, when they learn the correlation of adjectives to nouns or adverbs to verbs, they encounter the semantics of what can happen and what cannot happen. Can we say that if language educators open up the semantics formation and allow the learners to explore the possibilities of sense making within the language semantically, learners will understand the richness of language better? In other words, can we say that learners who are allowed to offer manifold ways of thinking in their modes of expressivity, in a second language, may have a better chance to recognize the wildness and vivacity of language than if they are kept within the boxes of "Do's" and "Dont's"? How can creativity of thought and richness of expressiveness be experienced by ESL? How can the modes of discourse be enhanced for ESL students so they can think reflectively? How can language educators motivate ESL learners to think profoundly? How can language educators make ESL learners express their immediate consciousness?

The same questions can be posed to the learners whose first language is English. How can language educators allow learners to find language as a mode of living. How can language educators allow learners to reflectively language their immediate consciousness and experience the creativity of their thought? How can language and languaging (as a verb) help the learners explore themselves and shape their lives?

The community may propound certain modes of expressiveness and promote them as prescriptive. This community may impose its obligations for language learning on the strength of its authority thus prescribing and proscribing certain modes of expressivity. To put it bluntly, he who writes the program for language education brings his perspective on language, knowing, and existence into the program. Unquestionable replication of the woven regulations would qualify the learners to reach the level of competency based on the diagnosis of the representatives. Interestingly enough, one can trace down the root of the representation and obligations (manifested in "is" and "ought" of the speech community) in the epistemological and ontological viewpoint of the dominant educational speech community. Therefore, if learners move in line with the underlying perspective of the authorities of language programs where "what needs to be learned" is defined, they are doing the right thing.

A change in language learning and language education through the dominant methodology, programs, and curriculum of the educational speech community requires a radically significant change in the epistemology and ontology of the dominant language education system where the beliefs, views, perspectives, interpretations and definitions towards thinking, language, rationality, and education are shaped, framed and organized. Changing some techniques and selecting others to get better results in an educational setting without questioning the issue of representations and obligations in the dominant pedagogical system of language may develop some superficial alterations in particularized aspects of language education but will not open up the world of possibilities for human learning of language, where personal and social growth, creativity, sublimity of thinking, and openly intelligible expressiveness move in line with languaging. To add computers in language classes may not do much justice to the possibility of looking into the mindful learning as a revisitation of questions on what it is that we teach, our areas of emphases, and what we consider learning may do. Above all, expressivity of immediate consciousness and experiencing the creativity of thought would make sense only if the etiological, epistemological and ontological questions of language and thinking are explored and scrutinized in light of questioning the representatives that define the borderline of competency, understanding and rationality within the speech community.

The question in the realm of language education for first language and ESL is this: how can the non-ordinary discourse open new possibilities for a better language education or even a better education, and develop further empowerment and enrichment of both thinking and language for language educators and students of language (no matter first language or ESL)?

Even in the most pregnant pauses where the silence strikingly reigns, language presents itself, and its presence is indispensably linked to the formation of thought, expressiveness of intention and delivery of communication. This understanding of language is not limited to the description of language as a system of signs where the codes identify themselves in a system of signs. Rather, this understanding of language goes beyond the identification and establishment of signs and incorporates meaning making and sense making not only in verbal aspects but in any process of thought formation from concept making and statement production to the most cryptic inner voices where language is proactively present. Hence, language, here, can be taken in its broadest sense which includes any sort of signification regardless of its exteriorization as an utterance and/or its happening in a non verbal form.

Language constitutes our being in that our being is characterized in the language we choose to use or the language we are subscribed to use. In its profound sense, our being is ineluctably tied to language and discourse shapes the bridge between us and the world. Language education, in this sense, is not merely teaching some techniques but introduces various ways of being in the world.

In this sense, language shapes our life. If the representation of language is circumscribed in narrow and parochial ways, it cannot represent anything but a confined package of presentations defined and prescribed by dominant discourses. Movement, in the limited interpretation of language, is permitted as far as the limiting representatives of language endorse. Consequently, obligations are generated from within the same limiting representations as to what should be done and what should not. If understanding towards language changes, the representations of language as well as the presentation of language would emerge in a new perspective which can accordingly offer new horizons and open up new realms of consideration in both private and public education (see for instance, Herda, 1999).

The pervasive influence of language in organizing our experiences and shaping our being demonstrates the overarching influence of language in our personhood and selfhood. Language, in this sense, determines what we notice and what we remember. A shift in language in this respect would generate a shift in our definitions, our analyses, our thinking and our behavior. The question of language and language education, therefore, goes back to a question of epistemology and ontology. If our epistemological and our ontological propositions have already blocked our ways and restrained our exegesis of language, our language education is ineluctably bound in the same restrictions. What we express, say, and describe would find their roots in the nascent thoughts that may cryptically or clearly parade. Our voices ultimately take us back to the underlying thoughts. Therefore, what is uttered can be in some from of relationship (not necessarily a cause and effect relationship) with the modes of thinking. Although the question of the indication of thought by language is still a controversial question with polemical responses, our languages open up the ways for exploring our thoughts. Total rupture of language in its fundamentally profound meaning would be tantamount to disconnection and severance of any human activity.

If language is so powerfully delineating our lives and if we are shaped through and by the languages we use, how can language education use language to open up the possibilities for a better life, a better living, and a better education? How can language education help us shape our lives through languages we choose to use rather than being shaped by the languages we are subscribed to use? If thinking can be improved through stimulation of our languages to bring new expressivity of what is around us, about us, beside us, for us, etc., what can language education do to improve both language and thinking?

As Ricoeur's discussion of language and discourse (1991) indicates, the manifestation of language in a sentence gives rise to discourse. Thus the sentence can be considered as the focus of creativity where meanings can be born and the burgeoning meanings open up new worlds. It is in line with these openings that the understanding and thinking can be transposed through a shift from merely focusing on actualities to looking at/into the possibilities and potentialities. Discourses, thus, are events and reports of an open process of mediation between mind and the world. It is in and through this process that the human mind, man, and reality are formed and shaped. Expressiveness is inevitably linked to the emergence of discourse, to the effect that any appearance of expressivity generates it own discourse. The dialect of the expressed and the unexpressed exhibits their conspicuity in discourse. One may create infinite creations through the finite means of language.

People may often be unaware of their immediate consciousness and their capacity to express (language) the subject matter of this consciousness. How can language education use the immediacy of consciousness and support the expressivity of that immediacy through empowering learners to use openly the possibilities and potentialities of language in shaping their realities better?

Notes

[1]. Self-concept is one's description of who one is. Identity is one's definition of who one is, namely those things that most fundamentally define who we are (Baumeister, 1986). [Back >]

[2]. University dissertation committees and journal editors more readily accept research supporting the dominant paradigm, and foundations and government agencies are more likely to fund such research (Rappaport, 1977). [Back >]

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