 I'm very happy to introduce to you Claire Cromch, whom I'm proud to recognize as a mentor, a colleague in intellectual pursuits, and a friend. Claire was born in France and studied at the École Normale and completed the aggregation in Germanic studies at the Université de Paris-sur-Bonne. She then emigrated to the United States where she taught German language and literature at MIT for many years. In 1990 she went to UC Berkeley where she currently teaches, but before going into that I want to say a word about 1989-90, where she spent a transitional year at Cornell University where I was teaching at the time. While she was at Cornell for only one year it was hugely transformational for Cornell as a whole and for me personally. It was Claire who brought applied linguistics to Cornell. I sat in on her course on literature and language teaching and it was the glimpse that she gave us of all of the exciting intellectual currents in applied linguistics, the complexities of thinking about language in its context of use, its activity and creativity as we talked about yesterday, her passion for the ideas that she was engaged with, as well as the interdisciplinary connections within applied linguistics that led me and others to look more closely at this area that she made so compelling. My intellectual trajectory and career have never been the same again. She really changed things for me. And I know that she has had the same effect on those who hear her give presentations at conferences as you are about to do. Those who read her many publications and talk with her about her exciting ideas. And I know of those who have had courses with her or have worked with her in her capacity as mentor, teacher, advisor and dissertation director, including the two who were the originators of this conference, Chantelle Warner and David Gremling. The fact that they were able to win a Confluence Center grant for this conference is undoubtedly due, at least in part, to the inspiration that they have found in Claire's intellectual vision which they encountered at Berkeley where they both did their doctoral work to her. Claire went to Berkeley in 1990 and was the founding director of the Berkeley Language Center, a research and development unit for all foreign language teachers on campus and which is justly famous for the support given to teaching and research in this area. She directed the Center until 1996 and currently holds an appointment as professor of German and foreign language education. When applied linguistics and its subfield second language acquisition, Claire's emphasis has always been on the social, cultural and stylistic approaches to language study. Her major books include discourse analysis and second language teaching, interaction at school, don't last long, managing conversations in German, foreign language research and cross cultural perspective, text and context, cross disciplinary perspectives on language study which is a book she edited on the basis of a conference that she gave while she was at Cornell, context and culture in language teaching, language and culture, language acquisition and language socialization, ecological perspectives and the multilingual subject. She also has many articles in well-known journals and chapters and seminal works. She also has many major awards. The American Council of Teachers of Foreign Languages, Nelson Brooks Award for the Teaching of Culture, the Modern Language Association, Kenneth Mildenberger Prize for Outstanding Research in the Study of Foreign Languages and Literatures, the Goethe Medal, an MLA Distinguished Service Award and a UC Berkeley Distinguished Teaching Award. She holds honorary doctorates from the Middlebury School of Languages and St. Michael's College. She was also president of the American Association of Applied Linguistics and co-editor of the Journal of Applied Linguistics. She is the founder and editor-in-chief of the University of California Electronic Journal, L2 or second language. Claire is clearly a multifaceted intellect and scholar. She will talk to us today about authenticity and legitimacy in multilingual second language acquisition. Please join me in welcoming Claire Krumsch. Thanks Linda, thanks Linda for kind introduction. Thank you Chantel, thank you David for this wonderful conference. It seems like at this time of the day and after the wonderful discussion we've just had that my talk will hopefully echo a lot of the ideas that have already been voiced and will serve as further fodder from the angle of SLA. I consider my field as SLA slash applied linguistics. So I will speak as an SLA person. We have our own network of references, our own jargon. And so I will ask for some of you who are less familiar with that field to bear with me which is why I have made a handout that at least has the bibliographic references to which I will refer so that you can find them there and the outline of my talk and some of the quotations. I will start with an anecdote from my own German department with which I'm affiliated at Berkeley. A few years ago, two or three years ago, the head of my department who is a literature scholar of the new historicist kind asked me to teach a course on that would sort of give a theoretical framework to our learners of German, our students in the language program and particularly to our majors. And I wanted to call this course and I thought it was a wonderful idea and I called this course issues in second language acquisition. When my syllabus and the abstract and my catalog entry landed on his desk, he sort of made a kind of, he rumbled his nose and he said that's the second language acquisition. That doesn't sound very sexy. Why don't you call it issues in bilingualism? I said, bilingualism, sure, sure, if bilingualism is more sexy than SLA, I didn't see exactly what was so sexy about bilingualism but he and he has a very keen sense on how you talk about things to deans, administrations and in the public at large. So I called my course issues in bilingualism and I'm teaching it this semester and then I went down and wrote my syllabus and then started the great big divide because research in second language acquisition and research in bilingualism are two different kettles of fish and I started realizing that research in second language acquisition had to do with the research based or studies how people in classrooms in particular but also in the wild learn languages that are not their own particularly in order to go abroad as Glenn showed but bilingualism is a field that looks at people who don't necessarily learn languages, who already have them from birth and particularly our language users, not so much language learners. So I had these two syllabies that I had to combine into one and I'm still grappling with the inconsistencies in my syllabus right now because my class that calling it issues in bilingualism is crosslisted with Spanish and I have 35 students in the class and 30 of them come from Spanish and are real bilinguals and then five of them come from German and are interested in SLA and I have these two constituencies that I have to accommodate in the same class and that has brought up a lot of interesting ideas on not only the two really quite different in philosophy and in outlook research fields of bi or multilingualism and SLA but it has also shown, given me insights in how the word bilingualism sometimes is euphemism not to call it a verbal hygiene, of minority education is bilingual education, bilingual education very often is not at all bilingual, it's just minority transitional education and the word bilingual has a whole lot of connotations beyond just the fact of mastering two linguistic systems and so I have had to deal with these issues that we started talking about here in this community here so I'm going to be talking about the multilingual challenge in my introduction the multilingual challenge in SLA in research and practice and I'm going to start out with developments in the field of SLA second language acquisition that started out in 1996 with a very famous article that you those of you who don't know less familiar with the field confined on your bibliography by Alan Firth and Johannes Wagner that they published then in 1997 and really started putting into question officially some of the foundational notions in the field of second language acquisition that are still the pillars of language teaching in classroom namely the notion of native speaker non-native speaker the notion of inter-language and the notion of learner for SLA anybody who is using or acquiring a language that is not his or her mother tongue is called a learner Firth and Wagner very forcefully argued that in order to be a learner you also have to be a user and why constantly compare students who are learning a foreign language to this elusive goal or target of a native speaker who by definition is considered to be monolingual why take a monolingual native speaker as the target for students who will by definition become if anything bilingual or even trilingual so there they were the first first and Wagner to put this discrepancy on the table and that was created a Ferrari in the field of second language acquisition in also in the notion of inter-language inter-language being this learner language that that progresses along a more or less predictable pathway linear pathway from zero blank slate to the end product that is supposed to be a native speaker and first and Wagner put that clearly into question by saying that people who come to the second language already have one so they are acquiring a second meaning they are on their way to becoming bilingual there are no means a blank slate and the end product will never be the monolingual native speaker so what are we talking about so in research the challenge by first and Wagner to the notions of native speaker inter-language and language learner started in 1996 within a discourse framework based on language in use it put into question what appeared to be fixed categories of SLA research and showed that a learner was not always a language learner but more often than not a language user not a deficient non-native speaker but a savvy communicator and navigator of communicative obstacles the first the first and Wagner challenge was followed in the next decade by other challenges that insisted that SLA was by definition the acquisition of a bilingual multi competence not a second monolingualism to use Penny Cook's idea of a pluralization of monolingualism we were not talking about teaching them another monolingualism but in fact a bilingualism so the increasingly multilingual composition of American classrooms in addition then led in 2011 last year to a special issue of the modern language journal edited by Senosh and Gorter on your handout on your bibliography entitled a multilingual approach in the study of multilingualism in school context thus acknowledging that SLA nowadays should be seen as the acquisition of multilingual and multicultural competences even if the object of instruction is only one standard linguistic system and for the first time two weeks ago triple AL holding his it's annual meeting in Boston at that meaning Stephen May talked about the multilingual turn in SLA and Lordus Ortega professor of psycholinguistic examined what empirical and theoretical research would be needed to support a by and multilingual outlook in linguistically and psycholinguistically oriented SLA research this is revolutionary as it puts into question the whole monolingual foundation of theoretical and applied linguistics so I'll be talking about that that for the research in practice the multilingual challenge to traditional SLA has tremendous implications for SLA practice it put into question the traditional national underpinnings of foreign language teaching the taken for granted standardization of grammatical pragmatic and sociolinguistic norms of verbal behavior the sacrosanct principle of L2 total immersion that is dear to communicative language teaching the exclusive authority of educational institutions to deliver foreign language instruction by contrast with non institutional venues like Skype and the Internet and other electronic networks ultimately multilingualism challenges the very goals of foreign language education in American academia avowably designed to teach quote usable skills in the supposedly monolingual environment of the target country and to enable American foreign language learners to perform supposedly universal communicative speech acts that will be understood and accepted by all because of their accurate grammar and appropriate pragmatics these were the days in this paper I want to focus on one aspect of the communicative challenge sorry the multilingual challenge to SLA namely the identity of the multi competent language user ever since Bonnie Norton's pathway pathbreaking study of immigrant learning immigrant women learning English in Canada her book her 2000 book Bonnie Norton identity and language learning and a net up of Lenco's study of language memoirs we have become familiar with the personal narratives of by or multi lingual individuals who learn use and live various languages in everyday life many of them report on the difficulties they encounter in trying to find an appropriate subject positioned for themselves in a world that although it contains an any number of multi linguals is conceived and organized for mono linguals we were talking about refrigerators earlier on it reminded me of right handed refrigerators or left handed refrigerators in a world of right handed people these difficulties focus on notions of authenticity and legitimacy that I first want to define and then reflect upon on the two levels that different researchers currently engage with in applied linguistics the modern and the postmodern I'll attempt in the end to consider some implications of a multilingual outlook for the teaching of foreign languages so let's take first an example that I have entitled authentic but not legitimate question mark as a student in Harvard ever Hoffman the Polish autobiographical narrator of lost in translation falls in love with an American student Tom and is seduced by his freewheeling Texan way of talking in a Cambridge coffeehouse Tom launches into one of his stories his riffs as she calls them that quote all American form the shape that language takes when it's not held down by codes of class or rules of manliness and or common repertory of inherited phrases end of quote in a passage that has been commented upon by SLA scholars in particular Schumann 1997 best Marist 2002 and myself in my multilingual subject Hoffman by now a fluent speaker of English describes a sudden feeling of speechlessness at adopting a discourse that she doesn't feel entitled to use and I'm going to be reading your first quotation on your handout this is America she writes where anything is possible and the slip and slide speech like jazz or action painting is the insertion of the self into the spaces of borderless possibility I listen breathlessly as Tom talks catching his every syncopation his every stress every Maverick rush over a mental hurdle then as I try to respond with equal spontaneity I reach frantically for the requisite tone the requisite accent a Texas drawl crosses a New England clip a groovy half sentence competes with an elegantly satirical comment I want to speak some kind of American but which kind to hit gee I say what a trip in every sense of the word Tom is perfectly satisfied with this response and I sound natural enough I sound like anybody else but I can't bear the artifice and for a moment I clutch my throat Titans paralysis threatens speechlessness used to be one of the common symptoms of classic hysteria I feel as though in me hysteria is brought on by tongue tied speechlessness this passage of Hoffman's otherwise amply discussed memoir has not been given the attention it deserves in the recent spate of recent literature of research literature on identity and language learning it describes a fleeting moment in Hoffman's seemingly successful acquisition of English and socialization into American academia at the end of her second year at Harvard this moment gets amplified over the next eight pages during her encounter with her former childhood lover Maurek who's on a visit from Poland quotation number two who are you maurek says examining my face where did you learn how to be a literary critic well I suppose it's that I'm an immigrant yes that must be it it's all turned out so well but in the next moment I'm gripped by fear and it's only the cracks between the parts that I can perceive the points of my mental triangle have externalized themselves so neatly that I can't make a move without bad faith at this moment every one of my complicities is a small betrayal 40 pages later Hoffman decides to go to a shrink psychotherapy what she calls the American cure enables her to find what she calls her true voice and the book ends on a redemptive note fairly typical of the genre in the passage page 219 219 the first quote that I read ever projected on Tom's way of talking the promotional identity of America itself as the land of unlimited possibilities her feeling of not being in her proper place was not an objective appraisal of her sociolinguistic capabilities but a subjective assessment of her legitimacy in a country in which supposedly anything is possible but conversely anything can also become impossible at any time depending on how one is perceived along the usual axes of race ethnicity social class geographical origins political leanings gender and sexual orientation and we would now have to add monolingualism in a space of borderless possibilities the boundaries of the legitimate and the illegitimate become fickle unpredictable in this case Tom was perfectly satisfied with ever's response but someone else might have felt she sounded hoity toy day or elitist or she herself might have felt like an immigrant imposter the terms she uses searching for the requisite tone the requisite accent the artifice meaning her deception her duplicity her complicity her bad faith her fear at being discovered at betraying both her Polish Jewish self and those who like Marik still take her for who she was before she moved to North America all these terms index feelings of illegitimacy even though her English sounds authentic enough as I said Hoffman speechlessness was not due to any lack of linguistic ability and certainly not to her inability to become an authentic meaning an authorized member of a community of Harvard academics no might it be attributed to some inherent psychological disability for which she needed a cycle psychoanalytic cure maybe she was not American enough to use English the American native speaker way to just say what she meant and say it like it is but it might be that with her literary sensibility she was pointing to a postmodern condition that SLA research has not yet grappled with and that has to do with all the stuff that we've been talking about in the last two days Hoffman is not the only bilingual to feel that she is an imposter many authors of language memoirs I talk about Shangri-Lee in his book native speaker Elias Kaneti the tongue set free Jean Paul Sartre in his words Nancy Houston nor Perdue Jacques Derrida of course in monolingualism of the other Abdel Kibir Katibi in Dubilien Griezmann report such feelings of fraudulence of being a Sartre would say de voyageur clandestine and critics are picking up on the problems of identity that such feelings occasion the latest being the book just published by Peter Brooks on enigmas of identity we have also other testimonies of other even our colleagues in applied linguistics such as Alan Luke the Chinese American scholar who talks about his grandfather emigrating to America and being hired by Hollywood to play the deviant Chinese and speaking Chinese with the appropriate masquerading as himself playing himself against himself in Hollywood movies to be to be accepted and to make money in this country so I've just covered with ever Hoffman the case of somebody who's authentic but doesn't feel she's legitimate let me take the opposite case now of somebody who is legitimate but certainly does not feel authentic and I'm grateful for that example to Brian Lennon in his book in Babel Babel's shadow where he quotes the passage that I'm going to read with you this is Ilan Starvance in his book on borrowed words in a conversation with Richard Rodriguez the multilingual author Ilan Starvance reports and I read quote number three a language is a set of spectacles through which the universe is seen afresh Yiddish these are the languages that he knows Yiddish is warm delectacle on a topaic Spanish is romantic perhaps a bit loose Hebrew is rough guttural English is precise almost mathematical the tongue I prefer today the one I feel happiest is in now perhaps spectacles are the wrong metaphor changing languages is like imposing another role on oneself like being someone else temporarily my English language persona is the one that superimposes itself on all the previous others in it are the seeds of Yiddish and Hebrew but mostly Spanish but is the person really the same you know sometimes I have the feeling I'm not one but two three four people is there an original person an essence I'm not altogether sure for without language I am nobody language makes us able to fit fit into a context but what is there to be found in the interstices between contexts and he says not silence Richard oh no something far less compelling pure kitsch I often find myself becoming pure kitsch a caricature of myself kitsch is vicarious experienced and fake sensations I've sometimes talked about a life on the hyphen as a neither nor a life in the in-between but it is precisely that in-betweenness that makes me so uneasy here we have a legitimate multilingual who feels inauthentic because not attached to the equation one language equals one context that could authenticate his origin and therefore authorize him to speak with recognizable authority like illegitimacy kitsch is of course a relational construct it indexes both bad taste as measured against the bourgeois norm of good taste and fake or imitation as compared to the genuine article that does not reflect upon its existence but merely exists kitsch is also fraudulent appropriation of class rights inauthentic glamour imitation of nobility which is the definition of snobbishness sine nobility interestingly it is this very reflexivity and class awareness that characterize both ever Hoffman and Elon Starvans as multilingual individuals and distinguish them from unreflected monolinguals who don't put into question the fit between the words they speak and the world they live in but is this an inauthenticity a characteristic of multilinguals there plenty of multilingual individuals who live their languages without thinking twice about them whether they use three or four languages on a daily basis in the mountains of Cameroon or happily switch back and forth between Spanish and English in the Spanglish speaking homes of New York and Southern California or change speech modes when crossing territorial borders or family boundaries in Europe see the research of François Grosjean for instance multilingualism has always been with us so what's new let me pass now to my second section multilingualism in the age of globalization the proliferation in recent years of language memoirs linguistic autobiographies testimonies of bilingual and bicultural individuals confessions of speakers co-hearst into a monolingualism of the other to quote Derrida ethnographies of non-native educators see George brain translingual imaginations like in Steve Kelman and lives in translations like in the the collection by Isabelle de Cortivan shows the renewed interest in lives on the hyphen identities lived in multiple languages and in multiple countries it is ultimately a symptoms a symptom of the larger flows of capital goods people images and discourses that are swirling around the globe and that we call globalization these flows as the sociolinguist Jan Blommat explains are driven by technological innovations mainly in the field of media and information and communication technology a few decades ago when the roles of native speaker and non-native speakers the structures of L1 and L2 the boundaries of speech communities were more clearly delineated and everyone knew their place legitimacy and authenticity were simple relatively the L2 belonged to whoever had mastered it in fact a famous article 1996 by Henry widowsen called the ownership of English is that English belongs to whoever has it and I even wrote a provocative article in the unteris praxis we him gehört die deutsche Sprache jedem der die Mühe genommen hat die Sprache zu lernen I got all the native Germans on my back for that one because they were still belong the native speaker belongs to native speakers in Germany and not to learners outside of Germany so but nevertheless I many people made the argument that the L2 belong to whoever had mastered it ownership of English was accessible to anyone who cared to learn it integration in a speech community was guaranteed to those who use the L2 like native speakers a learners communicative competence was measured against clear benchmark of grammatical pragmatic sociolinguistic and discourse competence and remains to this day evaluated for its ability to fit into the categories of accuracy fluency and cultural content as spoken by the monolingual speaker of a standard national L2 so if authenticity means with a recognizable origin then the monolingual native speaker was that origin and if legitimacy means authorized by a recognizable authority then the monolingual native speaker was that authority globalization has reshuffled the cards now that not monolingualism but multilingualism is slowly becoming the coin of the global realm authenticity and legitimacy do become an issue and it is not an issue that can be resolved by going to a usually monolingual American shrink hence the proliferation of metaphors we find applied to multilingual individuals think of the title of Andre Assiman's works false paper letters of transit lost in translation freaks and fakes and surreptitious I'm quoting here from Shangri-Lee surreptitious B plus students of life illegal aliens strangers followers traitors spies this flurry of interest in multilingualism is relatively new to the field of applied linguistics that like the field of linguistics has traditionally taken a monolingual approach to the study of language acquisition some applied linguists are starting to call for a bilingual approach to SLA and for a translingual approach to language use in multilingual global environments but these calls come generally from language from people who are teaching English and interested in English language teaching around the world these developments are taking place via two main approaches modern and postmodern they each have a different take on the issues of authenticity and legitimacy and I want to teach now take each one in turn so my section number three are modern approaches to multilingual identity applied linguists with a sense of social justice are drawn to a modern approach to multilingualism that shows how social reality is constructed maintained and reproduced through small acts of discourse in everyday life these discursive moves enact relations of power and identity in which the researcher is also involved SLA researchers anxious to give second language learners who often come from disadvantaged or minority backgrounds access to real or imagined communities to which they can legitimately belong have embraced a modern version of multilingualism that can be defined as the ability to use several linguistic systems in everyday life and to draw on several cultural contexts of experience to put forth several identities such as immigrant employee mother woman Spanish or English speaker and this is the the the approach that people like Annetta Pavlenko or Bonnie Norton have taken by becoming aware of their multiple changing and often conflictual identities multilingual individuals can capitalize on their intrinsic diversity and draw strength from living in between by problematizing established categories like native non-native speaker or linguistic and cultural authenticity they seek to diversify the notion of communicative competence and empower multilingual speakers to use language in ways that might differ from those of monolingual native speakers I want to look at now the work of Pavlenko and Blackledge 2004 for example in the introduction to their influential edited volume negotiation of identities in multilingual context Pavlenko and Blackledge claim that a social constructionist focus on the discursive construction of identities needs to be supplemented by a post-structuralist quote post-structuralist emphasis on the role of power relations end of quote heavily inspired by the work of sociologists like Bourdieu whom they put in the camp of so post-structuralists I am not quite sure I agree with that but that's their take they argue that their work quote illuminates ways in which particular identities are legitimized or devalued in the context of global and local political economies and they add Bourdieu's model of symbolic domination allows us to analyze the real-life impact of discursive categories as embedded within local and global relations of power Pavlenko and Blackledge make their modern orientation quite clear in quote number four on your handout they talk about the contributors to this volume who argue that social injustice through symbolic domination continues to occur in hyper-modern neoliberal democratic states and their institutions in asking questions about social justice about who has access to symbolic and material resources about who is in and who is out they take account not only of localized linguistic behaviors attitudes and beliefs they also locate them within a wider social context which includes class race ethnicity generation gender and sexuality by linking in such an explicit manner identity negotiation and social justice Pavlenko and Blackledge position themselves within a modern thought that tightly links language symbolic power and political activism to traditional categories of class race etc and to binaries like insider outsider dominant and dominated in the case of ever Hoffman that I discussed a little while ago modernist would see her hysteria as the typical transitional state of an advanced language learner reflecting on the difficulty of reconstructing herself as a legitimate speaker of English but after a stint at psychotherapy that helps her demystify the ideology of the illegitimate immigrant she gets empowered to claim social spaces and social prerogatives as her own legitimate right according to this modernist reading the narrator gets cured of her speechlessness by acknowledging the multiple layers of acquired voices that inhabit her her multiple selves out of which will emerge her own true voice if only by writing in global English about her personal journey for a readership of native and non-native English speakers such a reading resonates with Bonnie Norton's reading of her informants essays that show them changing the balance of power between them and their landlords and employers by drawing on the resources of their multilingual identities in their new environment and we find the same kind of modernist reading in Kinjinger's Alice story and Pavlenko and Lantov's stories of reconstructed selves what I see in these modernist readings of language learning practices is that you have a different bags different boxes that you can draw different a multiplicity of identities that are appropriate for the moment and empower you as a language learner build on your multilingualism or on your multiple identities. Can I get Roger and Sonosh and Gorta my to my next two researchers have also a kind of modernist reader of what multilingualism can bring to SLA also a question of multiplicity everything that they suggest will start with multi multilingualism multi modality capitalizing on diversity. So can I get Roger 2007 in his contribution to the special issue of the modern language journal on further sorry his not 2007 1997 in the issue of the MLJ Suresh Kanagaraja proposes broadening SLA research and theorizing language acquisition as multimodal multisensory multilateral and therefore multidimensional process drawing from his experience with English as a lingua franca he suggests taking as models of SLA not monolingual native speakers of English but the hybrid flexible and changing practices of multilingual English speakers around the world. He writes and I quote number five the multilingual speaker engages with the shifting and fluid situations in everyday life to learn strategies of negotiation and adaptation for meaning making acquisition is social practice not separable mastery of knowledge cognition or form. And he concludes it is time to revise reformulate and refine our models of acquisition for the more egalitarian context of transnational relations and multilingual communication. This is your happy world where everybody all the languages will be equal and happily ever after. So in an age of globally egalitarianism as the one proposed by Kanagaraja have Hoffman's sense of illegitimacy and Starvan's feeling of kitsch and inauthenticity become irrelevant. Sinosh and Gorta 2011 following up on Kanagaraja have firmly endorsed this kind of multilingual turn in foreign language education. They seek to put the focus on language practices in context rather than on language forms and meanings in texts. They advocate diversifying the context of acquisition outside the classroom and exploiting the semiotic potential of code switching as discursive and creative practice. Ultimately they want to bring together research on bilingualism and research on SLA by explicitly validating all languages and stressing their equal value. They seem to have eliminated any notion of kitsch or imposter. The linguistic world has become flat as Glenn said flat earths. In some modernist approaches to multilingual SLA seek to explain how language learner engages learners how language learning engages learners identities and how they can empower learners to adopt more satisfactory identities as members of inclusive speech communities. In the case of Hoffman they would ask what is it in her environment that makes her feel like an imposter. How can we empower her to feel like a legitimate speaker and owner of English in an American society that increasingly acknowledges its linguistic and cultural diversity. This of course raises other questions that I will deal with in my next section. Postmodern approaches to multilingual identity. Many applied linguists especially those who help immigrants deal with ethnic prejudice and discrimination and who seek to facilitate their adjustment in the host country would agree that applied linguists are called to play a political role of course in courtrooms and classrooms in hospital wards and health services in boardrooms and at press conferences applied linguists are confronted with political problems in the real world where the language culture nexus comes into play and their work has been helpful on the regional and national scale. But the multilingual approach advocated by Norton and Pavlenko, Kanagaraja and Sinosh and Gorda does not attack the real challenge to SLA presented by the use of language in global multilingual environments not only multilingual but global multilingual environments and particularly with regard to multilingual identity. For if imposter is a non-fixed, non-conventional and non-predictable posture or subject position, isn't imposter the very name of the game you have to play to survive in fluid global environments? To get a grasp of that challenge, I turn to three critical sociolinguists Debra Cameron, Alistair Penicook and Jan Blommert who have written extensively on the matter. Postmodern thinkers like Debra Cameron 2000 and Whedon of course 1987 earlier see culture as constructed in and through discourse and emerging locally from verbal interactions in historically contingent contexts. A postmodern approach to multilingual SLA precludes any essentialization of languages, cultures and identities. Rather than focus on fixed categories like men versus women, native versus non-native speakers, it turns its attention away from the structures themselves and focuses instead on the conditions of possibility of certain structures emerging rather than others at certain points in time. For example, as Cameron 2000 explains, the changes in current gender relations have made gender roles and the division of labor at home and in the workplace much less predictable than they used to be. And so male and female colleagues, we could say native and non-native speakers now have to negotiate how they are going to behave in specific situations and how they define who they are in that situation. This negotiation is quite different from the quote negotiation of intended meanings that are advocated by SLA researchers under the motto of effective communication. What we learn in communicative language teacher, you have to negotiate meaning. What is meant there is generally referential meaning. Communicative language teacher doesn't need, doesn't mean to say you have to negotiate who you are and the meaning of the situation itself. In global multilingual environments, what you have to negotiate are non-negotiable forms of symbolic capital that are by no means equal because they are the product of unequal histories and memories. Applied linguists in the post-modern vein don't ask how can ESL teachers help ever Hoffman get over her qualms of passing for a native speaker, but what conditions of Americanization, class consciousness and scholarly ambition have led this Polish immigrant to study at Harvard and to feel like an imposter when she speaks like a Harvard graduate. A much more difficult question to answer. The first question leads directly to social and political activism. The second does not lead to a concrete solution to the problem at hand, but addresses the more complex and no less political issue of linguistic diversity, cultural heterogeneity and global stratification. Alistair Penicook in Global Englishes and Transcultural Flows suggests that with English as this hyper-central language of the world, we have entered an era of trans-modern multilingualism where linguistic, visual and cultural forms of meaning making are necessarily hybrid, both local and delocalized, dynamic and unstable. He prefers the prefix trans to the prefix multi to express this kind of hybridity. Thank you. For example, in his analysis of hip-hop, Penicook shows how the trans-modal semiotics, and I'm reading now a quote number six, the trans-modal semiotics of music, lyrics, and dress articulates political and sub-cultural anti-hegemonic rebellion as well as aesthetics, a philosophy of life, and a particular range of identities. And you see in this quote how Penicook is already echoing some of the things we had talked about, that language is only one of the symbolic systems and should be taught as such even in language clauses, in addition to dress, face, posture, et cetera. Wherever it occurs, hip-hop offers new potential for local identity formation. What happens with hip-hop is for Penicook, the global, what he calls the global spread of authenticity, or should we say inauthentic authenticity? And that's something to discuss. Could hip-hop be the solution to this starvans' complaint about kitsch? Jan Blommert in his Sociolinguistics of Globalization 2010 offers a more general framework to understand the multilingualism of the global environments we are preparing our foreign language students for. And I'll move to my quote number seven. He explains that globalization is not one process but a complex of processes, evolving and developing at different scale levels. I have found his idea of multiple scales extremely fruitful for explaining the layered simultaneity of events that are taking place in our global world. With differences in scope, speed, and intensity. What is now circulating are not the full linguistic systems of homogenous speech communities, Blommert argues, of the kind that we teach in our foreign language classes, but what he calls semiotic repertoires, composed of specialized but partially and unevenly developed resources. A kind of what he calls truncated multilingualism. So in other words, what is circulating around the world are not the use of full fledged grammatical systems of the kind that we consider when we use to talk about multilingualism but truncated repertoires or bits, fragments of languages that are used according to the context, according to the need. And that carry different quantitative and qualitative symbolic value. So on the lower scale, you would have lower scale multilingualism that has to do with the exchange of referential meanings in various linguistic codes, subjected to the authority of the quote and quote native speaker, and to the instrumental or integrative motivation of language learners. But there is a higher scale multilingualism that has to do with the use of emblematic or indexical meanings in various modalities, whose functions are only marginally related to the exchange of information. Rather, this type of multilingualism derives and thrives on indexicalities of various kinds, such as manipulating the Frenchness of French, the Germanness of German, and the Americanness of American English. Let me give you a few examples. In certain context, an American accent is no longer the mark of authentic L2 English proficiency, but the result of a training to sound American when you are a call center employee in New Delhi. And you can be trained in an Australian accent, in an American accent, or a Singaporean accent. And Blomert describes that in his book. In that case, you have not simulated an American accent. You do have an American accent, but you don't have all the rest that goes with it. So you are a truncated multilingual. Let me remind you of the film, we're talking about films. One of the recent hits, at least, well, I think everywhere, was the film by Martin Scorsese, Hugo Cabret. Okay. A film that takes place exclusively in Paris. All the actors are Parisian. The kid is Parisian. The policeman is Parisian. Everybody's Parisian. This film, and I don't even know whether you noticed it when you saw it, is all in British English. Now, why would a film on Paris, and the Paris context, be in British English made by an American Hollywood producer? So, presumably this is because British English indexes European sophistication for American audiences. Now, here you have the use of native speaker British accent for totally different purposes than the conveyance of information. There's an upscale rest draw, if you know, perhaps you know it, in Los Angeles that calls itself La Poubelle. Now, those of you who know French means that La Poubelle means the garbage can. Now, who would want to go and have a lovely dinner at La Poubelle? But presumably, if you don't know French, you identify it with southern bell. Bell, something bell. It sounds great, and it sounds French in addition. So, because for an American ear, the second syllable indexes beauty and Frenchness in addition. So, as you can see, it's not the referential meaning of La Poubelle. It's what it indexes for an American ear. There is also in Miami and in Los Angeles, the top number one top restaurant, Cuban restaurant in Miami and Los Angeles is called Café Versailles. Now, I'm sensitive to that because I do come from Versailles and I'm pretty, I can't find the proper word to say what I feel when I see that Café Versailles sells refrito frijoles and café con leche. It's fine as a Cuban restaurant, but why did they call it Versailles? Presumably to index refinement and glamour associated with Versailles. An ad, which you all know in the 90s, sold Volkswagen and sold the Volkswagen experience with an unpronounceable German word, Farfagnügen. Now, I bet you with at least seven consonants linked one next to the other, the accumulation of consonants, the word by the way, Farfagnügen means pleasure to drive, nothing more than that. But with the accumulation of consonants, unpronounceable consonants and this ü that is sold the umlaut with the German, obviously it indexes the reliability and the resourcefulness of German engineering emblematically represented by an accumulation of unpronounceable phonemes. Similarly, if you take the McDonald's on the Champs-Élysées in Paris, it promotes its global reach with the phrase, the incorrect phrase, I'm loving it. A quintessential American emblem of casual grammar, youthful spontaneity and trans-modern reflexivity. I'm loving it. And it makes its way, of course. But for the French, it's not so much the broken grammar, but this broken grammar sells American-ness and therefore we have uses of foreign languages far beyond their referential. The last time I was in Vienna, leaving Vienna by road, on the side of the road, there was a sign by the Austrian Chamber of Commerce that thanked visitors to Vienna with the sign, Wien ist happy, dass Sie gekommen sind. Which means Vienna is happy that you came. But I asked my colleague next to me, seit wann hat die deutsche Sprache kein Wort für glücklich? Since when doesn't German have a word for glücklich? It was explained to me that it was indexing an American style of shallow pursuit of happiness. Now, who would have thought that the word happy pronounced like that? Happy is the shallow pursuit of happiness, but that is the new language, the new multilingualism that we find. And now, last time I was in China, I heard a lot of Chinese saying thank you to one another with the smile that goes with it when I said, why are you saying thank you? Oh, because he made a compliment. He made me a compliment. And I said, in which language did he make the compliment? Well, in Chinese. Well, so I say, why didn't you say thank you in Chinese? Well, we don't say thank you in Chinese. So we know we have to say thank you, but we can't say it in Chinese, so we say it in English. So we say it and we haven't said it. We can say it without having said it. So in all these examples, multilingualism manipulates various social and historical scales and orders of indexicality. It multiplies the centers of authority beyond native speakers and their monolingual grammars and dictionaries to include marketing strategies, Facebook and the internet. And of course, the question is justified, is there a monolingual logic behind the capitalistic practices of these multilingual instances? But clearly, today, language students need to know how to navigate multilingualism on these multiple scales of identities. So let me summarize where we've gotten up to now. The pervasive identity talk that Hoffman noticed in her American environment of the mid-70s is no longer something that can be cured by modernist expert systems like psychotherapy. A cure that starts with alienation and ends with redemption is no longer the way to deal with the effects of multilingualism in the age of global migrations and information technologies. The feeling of disorientation and artifice that Hoffman experienced then has become today the symptom of a transmodern breakdown of the usual categories, native speaker, non-native speaker, monolingual, bilingual, and of the multidimensionality of the semiotic experience associated with the use of multiple symbolic system of which language is only one. If we consider now that languages are no longer the unitary, self-enclosed linguistic systems that we teach in our language classes, but are seen from the perspective of multiple semiotic resources of which language is only one and language many aspects of language in the sense of truncated multilingualism, where does that leave us SLA practitioners, language teachers in the classroom having to teach a semiotic game on multiple scales of multilingualism. So just a few thoughts to finish what are the implications for SLA practice? And we have talked already about in this conference several ideas have been swirling around from Mary-Louise Pratt on the first day, suggesting that we make much better use of the differential capacity to comprehend and to produce. So we use PowerPoints in one language, we speak in the other. We can keep our monolingual classroom, but we can write on the blackboard in English or write in another language. In other words, capitalizing on these various modalities, various even material sub structures of language. So we treat L1, L2 and L3 and even the languages in the classroom as semiotic repertoires that we put in depending on the situation. And we can in fact teach, you can teach multilingual journals like I have done for instance on the fourth semester in German to teach students to reflectively code switch and justify their code switches in the same way as you would ask them to transcribe from the oral to the written or to translate from one language to the other or from one modality to another translating a poem into a drawing or a prose into poetry is part of the same playing around with semiotic resources. I think one of the consequences of this new way of look multilingual way of looking at SLA certainly encourages us at some point during the undergraduate for those of us teaching at the college level to teach the students to give the students the opportunity to reflect and reflect scientifically on their playing around with codes, with modes and modalities and speaks for the kind of minor that I for instance have just implemented at Berkeley, minor in applied language studies that serves as a capstone to the language learning experience on the undergraduate level and would initiate them a little bit to multilingualism, bilingualism and even to their SLA experience using the appropriate vocabulary. But mainly I would say the consequence and implication of everything I've been talking about is to engage our colleagues within our departments and I was not at the round table on the first night that Michael Holquist organized around the future of the humanities but this kind of multilingualism in SLA is raising the question of who are we teaching foreign languages for and they will always be people who want who are part or who want to strive to become part of a kind of global elite that will want to read the kinds of literary works, et cetera that we have traditionally in our departments but there will be some who prefer a more truncated kind of multilingualism, a kind of multilingualism that will allow them greater flexibility and mobility on the global scale and you will have people who want more trans-local resources more mobile resources in a variety of languages that will open the doors to opportunities but also open the doors to the imagination whether they are designing websites or designing other creative aspects of the new technologies that will not want to read Goethe and Schiller in the text but will want to use German for creative purposes of the more current kind. So let me conclude and then it's time that I open the floor. In a multi-scaler, a polycentric world of signs and symbols, notions like authenticity and legitimacy don't have the same meaning they had 30 years ago for an ever-Hoffmann nor even 10 years ago for an Elon Stavans. The power hierarchy of different forms of symbolic capital has not disappeared but it is now much more diverse and much more up for grabs. If SLA research is to embrace the bilingual semiotic turn, it will need to further explore what a bilingual outlook might mean for second language acquisition research and foreign language educators will need all the literary, poetic and aesthetic responses and resources they can muster to face up to the challenge of multilingualism in their monolingual classrooms. In our global age, what is needed is not the savant kind of polyglotism promoted or ridiculed by the media but as Michael Holquist would say the cunning and semiotic resourcefulness that comes from living in several versions of reality and their embodied linguistic expressions. Thank you very much for listening. Thank you. If I did not know you, but I have known you already for years, I would know now why I admire and love my new colleagues so much because I know where they're coming from. I don't want you to leave this conference without giving you another example that at another conference you can refer to this kind of indexing here in Tucson. Years, I think the first year I had come here, I saw a restaurant in town, actually a chain and I was so excited, it was called Wiener Schnitzel. I said to my wife, oh, I'm going to give you a really good Wiener Schnitzel. So we got there, it was a sloppy joke. So that would be hopefully an example when you're in China or wherever, wherever you can at least refer to Tucson with its horrible situations. I'll add that one. So I have actually two points I would like to raise and I wonder whether anyone really nowadays can feel completely authentic. I really wonder about that. I mean, when I go back to Europe nowadays, I always feel as a native German speaker, I feel inauthentic. I mean, I find myself constantly in an act, trying to re-adapt and pretending to be an authentic speaker which I will never be again and the same thing here. So in other words, we are beginning to move into a world where we're all kind of floating. And if I may just find a quick pragmatic question as to the basic language teaching, I fully appreciate what you said and I can fully see how you want to develop this further. But I wonder at the same time, don't we need always first to have a certain platform, let's say monolingual teaching in order to reach the multilingual dimension or don't we just confuse everyone without giving them first of all a base from which then they can divert later? I just don't know. I just wonder about the very practicality in whatever French 101, German 101 and so forth. Thank you. Thank you for the question which has led me, exactly I have thought along those lines, which has led me to call the German that we teach, German EG, we are teaching German, sure, we're teaching French, but it's only an example for the teaching of language and I think I'm echoing what Michael Holk was when he was MLA president, said what we are teaching when we teach A language is in fact nothing but language with a capital N. So we would continue to teach German, but make sure every time that the students understand it's only a case study. I'm teaching German as a case study. Now, this is quite offensive to the native speakers Germans in my department. They don't like to be thinking of themselves as case studies. They want to have access to the real, the authentic native speaker culture, et cetera. But I think, and to go back to your original, to your first comment, I think authenticity is no longer in the absolute truth, but in the game itself, it's your ability to play the game. We are all playing games, which is both the strength and of course then the problem that we get then is where's, number one, where's agency and secondly, where's political action. And that I'm glad I have my graduate students who are always reminding me, Claire, do you mean to say all this post-modern, where's the political action? And how do you change the world? I don't know the answer to that. Thank you so much, Claire. That also was very cathartic. And I want to pick up on the bridge you made from the modern to the post-modern and where you describe the remedy to the modern being forms of social activism, the kind of awareness raising, and you reference those carrier bags that you can dip into to then be empowered. And where I think you finished, which was with almost a call to poetic activism within this sphere, but I'm wondering as someone engaged and active, whether poetic activism is also maybe part of what we might call the kind of Occupy Multilingualism movement. I'll give you credit for that one. That's a very good idea. Occupy Multilingualism, yes, absolutely. And I wonder whether Paulo Freire and all this emancipation literacy didn't have that originally as its goal. Definitely, because as you enlighten people, not so much Cartesian-like and logically, but through emotions and through their investment, yes, you are in fact also preparing them to face. You're not giving them the solutions, but you're preparing the ground for them to find solutions when they come up, because we are dealing with in that kind of global context, we are dealing with fundamental unpredictability. You have to be prepared to seize the moment when it comes and to know which language to plug in just at the moment. How do you develop that if not through, yes, poetry, humor, tales, narratives, yeah, tricksters, that's what we want to, yes. Indeed, I couldn't help thinking when you were going through the various historic progressions towards where we are right now, which I think is an age of cunning, that the history of thinking about the word as it's been present in a number of eminent poets and things would be helpful in thinking about how these come together. In the Bible, it is said that in the beginning was the word and I mean, Goethe tells us that it is the act. I think that we're at a place where Samuel Beckett really gets it right, as he says in Murphy, in the beginning was the pun. That's right, Nisso. Yeah, I mean, and for instance, in an applied language studies, I mean, I would definitely give some de Certe for them to read, of course. Yes. I was really curious about the preparatory course that you created to introduce students that will eventually be studying language and culture, what impact that has had on those very students who then later go into language courses, because I've been saying forever, we need that here at U of A. Yes, whether they take it after, or whether they take it before, it would be even better after or in the middle of their courses, but as a capstone, definitely we give part of this applied language studies. I didn't call it applied linguistics because the linguists freak out. So I called it applied language studies. It doesn't threaten anybody. And it's administered through the, I didn't want it administered through any particular language and literature program. So it's administered through the undergraduate interdisciplinary studies program that we have. And they embrace that to my surprise, it doesn't cost them anything. So they embraced it. The part of that five course is one obligatory introduction to applied language studies that we teach every fall. The wonderful thing about this course is that you can put in anything you want in there. You can take language by whatever end you want. I'm using, and I've been using the last two times that I've taught it, Barbara Johnstone's discourse analysis class to give them a sense of what language does in conversation in everyday life. So how to recognize from speech acts to face work to all the tenets of discourse analysis. But in addition, then I give them a smattering of second language acquisition theory, language at work, language in daily practice. And it's the opportunity for me to bring in to the class as guest speakers, people from the professions, such as a lawyer, such as somebody who has a degree in anthropology from Berkeley, but now works for the HMO Kaiser Permanente as a researcher to research doctor-patient interactions. So to show them how that is useful all from the health professions or an interpreter, a simultaneous interpreter. So I can bring these people to class to show them how language operates in everyday life. And when they leave with that minor on their degree, it helps them for any further studies or any employment in communication studies, the health professional law, medical, all these fields where language plays a major role. So yeah. I had another quick question. With respect to multilingualism, I think we're already facing a certain phenomenon like that globally. And I'm thinking of conference English. You know, you go to so many different conferences and everyone speaks English. And then when you really pay close attention, no one speaks proper English. That's whatever proper might mean. But it's really a very odd phenomenon. Let's say you have the Danish and the Swedes and the Russians and the Chinese and they all speak some kind of English, which is however, well, both mono and multilingual in a very odd mix. It's almost the old grammar. I think you almost face that situation in that sphere. Would you agree with that? There is quite a tolerance of various accent and various levels of grammaticality, et cetera. I think, however, the native speaker aura and prestige commercially is well thriving in places like Asia, et cetera, et cetera. But even in the Goethe Institutes, if you've got a Greek name like Gustave Annopoulos or what, you will not be hired by Goethe Institute in Paris to teach German. So there still is a hierarchy of languages and identities, et cetera. Yeah, I mean, some of my students who are mono-lingual English, because are very distraught by the phenomenon that you're talking about. They feel that English has been, they have been deprived of their mother tongue, they only speak a lingua franca. And that distresses them quite a bit. Good. We can. Hey, let's see. On that note, I'd like to thank you all and thank Professor Clark Crumpsch for being with us this evening.