When a student is learning a new language, he or she will, hopefully, be surrounded by ways to foster their personal language awareness, both generally and critically, as Chapter 7 in Kumaravadivelu. The author also goes on to note that “it is only recently that concerted efforts have been made to educational circles to relate language awareness directly to educational policies” (157). Both of the movements discussed here were attempting to combat “linguistic complacency,” uncovering the social and political implications that language holds. Yet I wonder how that movement can be taken one step forward, to help the general public fight its own linguistic complacency about what goes in US public schools and in the policies enacted in those institutions.
I have been reading various articles on perceptual dialectology, or, basically, giving people a map of someplace (the US, for instance) and having them fill in where dialects, languages, etc. come in. All of these studies have one thing in common: The ignorance of the general public about language and the uncanny ability by most to easily label the common language stereotypes. Idealistically speaking, it would be much easier to help L2 students develop language awareness with the backing of the general public, but how does one (or many) even go about doing this monumental task?
On a somewhat unrelated note, in Chapter 5, I found the discussion of the different types of interaction to be interesting. However, I feel as if the concept of “interaction as a textual activity” could be problematized a bit. The book talks about the use of texts as interaction tools as a sort of one way street, through input to the person. However, I do wonder if that idea is a bit too simply. Reading any text is a negotiated activity, between the reader and the text. The characteristics, views, and other identity constructs that a reader brings to a particular text will inevitably change how that text is viewed, allowing that text to be negotiated and allowing the reader the ability for potential “output” for that text. I’ll admit that I’m still working out this idea in my brain, but I think that this idea of reader/book as a give and take sort of interaction depends on how a person views the act of reading and writing itself. Some questions that I am thinking about related to this: How does a text change based on the L2 reader currently reading it? How is it read differently based on different readers in the class? Does this mean that each student, then, subsequently, has a different interaction with that particular text? Do words on a page simply stay singular words (even after the author wrote them) until a reader comes along to put meaning onto them?
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