 Next, we have Glenn Levine, who is Associate Professor of German and Faculty Director at the University of California Irvine Center for International Education, and his talk is entitled, Can Multilingualism Be Simulated Languages and Cultures as Moving Targets Inside and Beyond the Classroom? That was fascinating. Actually, I already want to ask questions, but we'll wait. Really, really outstanding. I know you've, Chantel and David, you've been thanked every time somebody comes up here, but I really am deeply grateful that I could be part of this event. I think every symposium should be run exactly like this and bring this kind of diversity of people and ideas together. It's really outstanding. And I'm thrilled to be here. So I'm going to bring the language classroom into all of this now that we've talked about so many different issues. So in this presentation, I'll tell you a little bit about a very new research project that I have begun just in the last year, and it's still in the development stage. And I'll try to get at the question of whether multilingualism can be simulated in the language classroom. In working it through, I started by asking myself, should multilingualism be simulated? So in previous work I've done on classroom code choice, as I call it, I have argued for the many reasons why language is and should, the language classroom is and should be regarded as a multilingual social and pedagogical space. And that the first language, and I'll use the term L1, I think that's totally fine to use here, right? The L1 has important and useful functions as part of language learning and teaching. So my answer to that has been for some time, yes, there's a strong imperative to simulate multilingualism if that is possible. And the next questions then for me are who's multilingualism and what sort of multilingualism we're considering. Which led me then to consider that if we're to serve our students well, I think it should be their own multilingualism and not some external, not only some externally determined understanding of it, and that it should be ecologically and educationally feasible and not some new pedagogical holy grail attainable only if they become expatriates or graduate students in that language. So to the first question of who's multilingualism, oh sorry, who's multilingualism and what I mean when I say the learner's own multilingualism. So beginning in the 1990s, probably a little earlier, and the rising public debate over globalization and assertions of flat earths and the increasing disregard for actual political boundaries by a lot of people with the playful and oftentimes contested crossings of cultural and linguistic boundaries. And then to Prensky's influential opening volley and the debate over the nature of the new digital native generation compared with the older digital immigrant generations. The world of language education, to me, appears to have been left behind in some ways. To be sure in our brave new digital classroom, as Bob Blake calls it and others call it, the profession continues to merge technologies into language teaching in ways that are often seamless and do take good advantage of learners' digital literacies and diverse preferences and learning styles. There are many teachers affording access to multilingual worlds all over the world, both digital and non-digital, every day. But what I'm talking about here and what I would like to argue today is that the way we think about the language classroom as both a multilingual space in its own right as well as a safe training ground for students to go out and engage with the multilingual world may be out of step with the reality of the globalized multilingual world that our students inhabit or at least the way many of our students experience their own multilingualism when they go abroad and live in communities of practice in the L2 society. So what does this world look like? It's, of course, largely dominated by global English in many places. But for multilingual individuals in the world, it also means a greater mingling and merging of the digital and the non-digital than we've seen in previous generations. The implications for this language pedagogy are both troubling and exciting. At the same time, they're troubling because it makes the job of the language teacher all the more difficult to help learners gain access to new cultural frames and discourses that have become increasingly complex, not just with multiple languages in play, but also multiple media for meaning making and hybrid literacies. What was already a tall order educationally is now made more difficult and complex by the moving target of multilingual digital and non-digital discourse worlds to which we wish our students to gain access. But it's also exciting because the very increased seamlessness between digital and non-digital cultures and discourses means that language educators have a multitude of means for bringing the globalized multilingual world to their students, way beyond cool internet scavenger hunts and things that we've been doing for a long time. It's exciting because we can think about pedagogy in terms of learners' subjectivities as individuals, individual learners, each of whom might connect with their own nascent multilingualism as well as outward to the multilingual world in the safety of the classroom. And it's exciting because we can perhaps bring to bear digital literacies and discourses that our learners may already share with people in the L2 society. The key factor to keep in mind at this point is that what is needed in pedagogy is a pedagogy not just oriented toward new and clever ways of technologically linking others at a distance. We already can do that pretty well, but a pedagogy that helps students explore why they would want to do that beyond the goals of language learning and practice. And this is where the teacher can be useful. How might we accommodate and integrate the complexities of a globalized multilingual world into how we approach curriculum and teaching is the second issue I mentioned out of what sort of multilingualism our students can or should develop. And I propose that we do this through a focus not only on the macro level of the global linguistic world but on the subjective experience of learning and using a new language and connecting with people in a new culture. So in the next segment I'll do this by actually moving very far away from the classroom in the U.S. context to the study abroad context as the usually ostensible ideal goal of what we're teaching our students in the classroom, what we're preparing them for. So acculturation and its discontents, so students abroad and at home in the world. So what I've cut out of this presentation to keep in the time is a review of the really, really wonderful, interesting literature on study abroad that's grown in recent years. It's worked by Celeste Kinginger and Jackson and Pellegrino Avaini. I'm happy to share these references if you email me. But I'm going to move straight away to just looking at this small examination of a small study I've been working on, on one study abroad situation. I conducted this exploratory study in order to get a picture of students' experiences abroad. In particular, their day-to-day uses of language and, in my case, German and English, and their day-to-day uses of digital media, everything from cell phones to Facebook. And I don't want to scare you. Sorry. Can you read that? Okay. I've totally violated the don't put too many words on the slide rule because I just want to, this isn't about, I'm not here to sort of walk you through my methodology and all that. I might just point out that it was a very small group. I had 11 students from different U.S. universities, six women and five men. The interesting thing about them, they were all raised in, reported being raised on monolingual English households. I didn't plan it that way, but it worked out that way. And I'd learned German as a foreign language, either in high school or in college. And that all, but one of them was a German studies minor or major. That was also, none of this was planned because I couldn't, I had to take the students that stepped up to do this. But it's run out of a study center in Heidelberg in Southern Germany. And the students live in dorms or shared apartments. And they have a classroom space in the study center and a hanging out space and a German only rule in their study center. It's quite a nice program that they are part of. They also have an internship, many of whom did it in English, meaning they had to do English things the whole time they did their internship. And what they did for me is an initial very extensive survey about their language background and who they are linguistically and about their experiences to that point. And then they then completed what I called a daily language use and digital media log. And it was a short thing that I asked them to go online and write and tell me about what they've been doing in the previous 24 hours with digital media and with language, like who have they been talking to, you know, who they've been spending time with and in what language, what language is. And then I did quite a number of follow-up emails with many of them to ask more about things they had written. And then half of them, five of them gave me access to their Facebook pages. I did put there, I got full ethics support for that. Another story entirely. So that's sort of the really short version of what I'm talking about here. So you want to turn the lights back up on that. Okay. I'll go right to what I found out. So they engaged in what Pellegrino-Aveni in a case study of students studying abroad in Russia identified as sort of four dimensions of the construction of self. And she's drawing from a number of intellectual sources with that. Namely, control, status, safety, and validation through daily face-to-face contact with two groups of networks of fellow English speakers. One was their fellow study abroad students, and the second were their families and friends back home. Most of this communication did take place in English except in situations mandated by others, usually in the classroom or through in the study center with the German-only rule they had. And the results can be divided largely into what students did with language, which I'll talk about for a bit, in this case just German and English. This particular group did not use languages beyond that. And then I'll talk about digital media. Okay. Let me just see how I'm doing. Okay. So first, wait a minute. Okay. Their uses of English and German were what I would call highly fluid in their day-to-day practices, and that all of them did use both of those languages almost every day. And second, that the two languages were important for getting things done, the various things that they needed to do daily. And overall, as I just mentioned, their uses of German were determined externally by coursework and the study center or their internship when German was called for. And that really importantly is that overall the meaningful social networks that these 11 people participated in remained in their sort of own culture realm, both digitally and non-digitally. And so by and large these students formed social bonds very strongly with each other and contributed to what Papa Tziba calls a cocoon, a cultural cocoon in his study of French Erasmus students studying abroad in different European countries. Motivations and priorities in comparing responses about language choice in their logs and motivations in the initial survey, what was notable was about the responses was their complete variability. I was not able to pin down any patterns. I expected that I would see that the students who reported very high motivation to connect with Germans and socialize in Germany would also be the ones that report using German the most and English the least. But that is not what happened. They appeared just as likely to use lots of English as German in their day-to-day lives. And so overall most of the students did view it as important to make German friends and spend as much time as possible with Germans while they were abroad. I'll put those couple of quotes up. Even though that by and large what I have doesn't reveal that they engaged in much, a whole lot of face-to-face interaction with Germans on a day-to-day basis. So one student, Sam, I'll call him Sam, reported the same motivation to connect with Germans but expressed some frustration in this item on all of them except for Sam, they all said I really, I came here, I really wanted to connect with Germans and I really think that's important to get, make friends with Germans or German speakers. But he said I think it's very important for me because it's the best time to practice my German while I'm in Germany. It's frustrating to hang out with mainly other Americans from our exchange program and speak mainly English because they don't want to speak German and mess it up. I think we're here to make mistakes and be corrected so we should speak it way more. Interestingly though, Sam didn't do that in the whole time, at least not if his reports to me about his daily use are accurate. The one exception to this consistent sort of response about how important it is was from another student who I'll call Amelia who reported across the board the lowest degree of motivation or inclination or investment is how it's often talked about to connect with people in Germany. She says first of all I really wanted to meet, I wanted to really meet people and make friends with lots of Germans but then I realized how unfriendly Germans can be to people and I realized that I'm most likely better off sticking with my, with a few friends in the program. I do have, I just don't trust people very much for various reasons. So I don't, I'm not dismissing her as a very deeply felt pain and in fact of all the people, I'd have to say the language pain we've been talking about was felt by this student perhaps more than with many others. So the overall idealization of connecting with Germans is interesting because it suggests an important factor in thinking about pedagogy. So sorry to make that big leap back to what does this tell us about teaching but that's, that's my job here right now, except for isolated comments such as Sam's or blanket negative judgments such as Amelia's. Overall these students do not appear to make a linkage between the daily use of English and or German and connecting socially with Germans. Even for Sam it seems to be about the performance of German, of the German language rather than connecting socially without exception this group's face-to-face social networks revolved around fellow program participants were English and yes some German were part of life nearly every day and what is clear is that the patterns of code choice do not line up with how we generally teach language in our classrooms and even how we imagine from the U.S. an immersion experience to be or how it might run. And also I might qualify that and say I'm not claiming that this program is somehow, you know, generalizable to any number of programs there's so many different kinds of programs out there so just to be clear on that I'm just looking at this one to try and learn about these categories and these ways of being in a new place and a new culture. So in terms of digital communication, see very few words now, I can be very quick about this, few interesting and very consistent things emerged from all of the data there were clear patterns there, texting this particular group didn't make avid use of texting as unlike Germans in part because all of them appeared to have non-smart phones kind of like my thing here, this thing here and that had prepaid minutes and prepaid texts so basically that was, you know, if they all had iPhones it might have been a very different thing but they didn't. So gaming, I did ask them all about gaming, only one of them engaged in some little amount of gaming that had to do with really other factors but watching videos almost all of them reported watching videos, movies, YouTube, TV shows with regularity in English and that very few of them reported ever watching TVs, TV series or movies in German, I found that surprising but unless they're lying that's what they did and then social networks and digital interlocutors with almost no exception students interacted digitally in English and almost exclusively with fellow program participants who were right there in Heidelberg or with their friends and family back home and that the media of choice with almost no exception the students communicated primarily by email, largely with family and through Facebook with friends and then every now and then a little with Germans in Germany in English usually. So Facebook, that came out to be the media of choice. I probably should have asked you, what do you think the media of choice was? Well guess what, it's Facebook. Facebook is the media medium of the moment because and I think it bears on how we model or simulate multilingualism for language pedagogy. I'll focus for a few minutes, check my time. Okay. I want to focus for just a minute or two on the use of Facebook and how these people were using it even though as I've already said it was largely in English. So lots and lots of pictures, it's basically their online photo album, very few text postings beyond single phrases or sentences. By and large, even people who were on Facebook a lot. Other thing is they were having a blast. It didn't matter what they were reporting to me in their log about difficulties and frustrations and stresses that did not appear on Facebook. What appeared on Facebook was fun, lots of fun being had at excursions and parties just like here. I mean it won't surprise you to see that if you've seen Facebook but and the personas that people put forward. Text postings when they did appear were usually to clarify plans for trips or excursions or parties and to comment on other people's photos. And that contact from other people was usually in the form of how's it going from family in various ways or lots of expressions of gosh I miss you, right? From mom, from sis, from friends, lots of that, usually unanswered. Usually where it would be there and there wouldn't be a follow-up post. Okay, so use of German on Facebook, hardly at all and really interestingly, maybe even interestingly for this discussion we want to have, only at the beginning, the first week or two when they showed up in Germany. They were typing in German very much like this, not much, but those that did put things like that. I'm sorry I did not translate it for people who don't speak German here. I now have a cell phone but I don't have any minutes. Hopefully I'll buy some tomorrow. So and I live in Europa, Europa Haus 3, so that's what he put up. None of the subsequent postings were in German, that was it for the year. So that's an interesting thing that they start out with this excitement about posting in German right when they showed up. Okay, let me just say for a minute what students are not using Facebook for and then I'll go to my concluding bit. They're not using it to report what they're up to, except for photos, showing how wonderful their excursions and parties are. They're not using it for networking with Germans or even non-studies participants, other international students. I always ask them about that, not just Germans but other international students or other non-Germans in Germany. They don't use it for writing in German, for practicing German. I know all the German teachers would be like, oh, I would love for them to use it for practicing German but they're not doing that. Okay, this group anyway. I'm sure there's thousands out there who are doing that but maybe not. Anyway, so multilingual 2.0, is this multilingualism? They're using German and English every day. Isn't that multilingualism? So based on this brief picture of the experiences of these university students abroad, we can ask, you know, what sort of multilingualism is this? We can ask whether it's multilingualism as such or maybe two monolingualisms side by side while they're abroad and if it's that latter one, is that also monolingualism? I'm throwing this question out actually for our discussion. Is it diglossia? Is it something entirely different? So with regard to adult instructed acquisition, I think we can consider what is important to students themselves because that's really what I was trying to get at, not just what they're doing but what seems to be important to them and that this is not a static thing. I can't just take one brush and paint all that. It's sort of a dynamic changing thing even for these people and that participation in social networks in Germany appeared to happen selectively through instruction or through interactions in their internships or choirs or clubs, which all these people also did and that participation in Germans' social networks seems to remain on the periphery of their experience for these 11 people even though all but one of them placed great importance on connecting with Germans. So my reading of the students' situations matches with what Sam observed, the students want to integrate better into German social networks but the sort of quotidian situated need to have control, to maintain status, to have safety and to achieve validation seemed to override efforts that might have been made to move beyond that peripheral experience of German social life and so I'd say there's inherent tension between that idealized or idealistic aim of social connection and the performative orientation toward learning German that the students revealed. And this is where pedagogy comes in the picture. Okay. As a language teacher, I can be critical of the students of these students' language and social networking choices, wag a finger at them and say, you know, what sorts of teaching in the classroom might afford the chance for a less peripheral position in German social networks if these were my students? And further, this pedagogical intervention would take place far away from the L2 society so what are the implications for digital media use if my Heidelberg students abroad remained digitally in their own family and friends networks and in English? So I'll give you two conflicting positions, the suggestion of failure to become intercultural speakers through language education, that language education would envision for these students gives us two positions that appear contradictory. The one position is that these study abroad students remained on the periphery of German culture and society. They remained what Byram described really as tourists rather than sojourners whereby tourists travel and experience the world but are neither fundamentally transformed by the experience nor do they affect people in the places they visit. According to Phips and Gonzalez, study abroad like tourist travel may be evidence of cosmopolitanism which allows the traveler to quote, carry her literal and symbolic baggage wherever she goes and to live out of that one suitcase. So at the same time, at some level this constitutes a failure of our educational model, what I was talking about being out of step. For most of these students appear not to have been transformed interculturally in the way we language educators would envision even if they did improve their German and learned a lot about German society and culture which they did and found a new sort of independence and confidence that so many study abroad students describe. The other position is that these students were roundly successful. They succeeded at striking a balance between what Pellegrino Avaini calls her ideal selves and the reality of their situations in order to maintain their sense of well-being. The seamless, porous nature of digital and non-digital social networks between being in Heidelberg and being at home serve to make this balance all the easier for them to strike. The students were essentially fulfilling what Phips and Gonzalez and others drawing on Lyotard and Ronald Barnett have called performative language learning and use. We've trained them to regard language learning with this performative orientation rather than viewing it as inherently integrated with their very subjectivities. And this is exactly what they did and they did it very well. So where do these two contradictory positions meet up? I think they meet at the largest implication for pedagogy it's not just about the student understanding the other abroad. It's about the student having new ways of understanding herself or himself being abroad. Backing that up to the classroom context including for the student who never goes abroad. It's about creating affordances for them to understand themselves in the process of transforming their perspectives of their own identities and languages and cultures through learning the new one. And to my mind, this is where the goals of humanistic inquiry and education I brought to bear even in introductory German or French or Chinese. And so what's needed are means to help learners connect with the subjective or as Claire Kramsch has written, the visceral, the emotional dimensions of language and culture learning from the beginning of instruction. So does the mere fact of their engaging daily in English with their fellow program participants both face to face and through Facebook indicate that all we would need to do would be to remove that component from the program forcing them to find Germans to interact with. Some programs do that in fact. I suggest this would not be realistic though at least for these students I got to know because even in the absence of the US student social support network, these students would still need to establish some sort of social comfort zone, face to face online or both. And what my experience is what these students has taught me is that being in the new culture is on the surface perhaps about learning a new language. They take classes in German, they're engaged in interesting things, German. They relish their excursions and the cultural and historical learning that is part of it. But in a way it plays out in the day-to-day lives of these people the way it plays out is much more about students remaining in some sort of comfort zone and that is where we fall short I think. So in her study abroad is in her study of study abroad students in Russia. And this is I'm ending here. Pellegrino Avaini proposed the idea of identity competence as a pedagogical goal which she defines as the ability to establish and maintain the desired level of control, status, safety and validation while interacting in the second language in order to present her, his identity successfully. And I consider this to be quite compatible with Kamsha's notion of symbolic competence which definitely I think is still absent from conventional language pedagogy. What we need in the classroom then is a way to train learners to operate multi-lingually in ways that will still provide affordances to learn in depth and critically about the new language and culture about what's important to people in that culture while still exploring their own sense of identity, their own multi-lingual selves. And this can be done through task-based and critical inquiry projects. In fact I had a long list of things I would love to talk about with how you could make this happen. It would certainly involve channeling students' digital literacies and practices toward connecting in real time with L2 speakers abroad in new ways. I think the imperative is strong to rethink language pedagogy in these terms to bring what we do into step with the realities of multi-lingualism in a globalized and very complex world. Thank you.