There was a time when teachers who taught English came across as people who were articulate, confident, up-to-date, forward-looking, dedicated, personable, but stoically monolingual. In school, the English teachers spoke only English. I was educated in an English-medium school not long after Singapore became independent from its colonial rulers, at a time when there was also vernacular-medium (Chinese, Malay and Tamil) education. For all I knew, my English teachers, who were all of Indian, Chinese, Malay, Ceylonese, or Eurasian origin could have been what we would now term multilinguals or translinguals. Today, I would confidently vouch for this truth as I remember from childhood that the people around me were confident and practiced multilingual translanguagers in their own right. With characteristic if animated fluidity, they drew on their repertoire of languaging modes, with little conflict or self-consciousness that most of the time, their type of languaging or communication did not involve one single dictionary-bound language but a veritable and happy combination of many. For these people, it did not matter so much whether they were speaking in a mixture of Malay and Tamil or Cantonese, Hakka and English, but the fact that they were going to get their meanings and subtleties across with little pretention, more often with a flavor or fervor that perhaps would secretly have been the envy of any sworn or norm-compliant monolingual. Not that these people were so well-educated with many a coveted university qualification. Many were but some were not. The teachers who taught children, the doctors who treated them, the nurses who skillfully inoculated them with diphtheria and tuberculosis vaccines (not forgetting people like the kind padre who baptized me as a child), were of the kinds of people who had duly earned their educational accreditations. But there were also the peons, sopirs, gardeners and domestic helpers who were just as effective in multilingual communication and even more impressive with the earthy worldviews they espoused in their repertoire and mix of various languages and expressions. At least that was how it was in the Singapore that I grew up in. Then of course came, as part of education and nation building, government led campaigns like the Speak Mandarin Campaign or the Speak Good English Campaign or the well-meaning initiative to encourage the speaking of Bahasa Baku (acrolectal or educated Malay) that reified the power and propriety of prim and proper language, but that is a matter for sociolinguists and other keen observers interested in the politics of language in the discourses of nation building in post-independence Singapore.
I write this book as what scholars now call a multilingual speaker of English, being fluent in Thai, Lao, Malay, Indonesian, Japanese, Mandarin and several Chinese dialects. When I was able to utter my first words, they came forth in what would commonly be recognized as Cantonese, a southern Chinese dialect. (Mandarin is the only officially recognized form or variety of Chinese that is used in officialdom for policy making and administration.) Other instantiations of Chinese apart from Mandarin are referred to in Singaporean parlance as âdialectsâ which include Min or Fujian, Yue or Cantonese, Hakka, Teochew, Hainan, Foochow spoken by early migrants from different parts of China. Growing up, I learnt to speak the Fujian dialect, because it was (and still is) the most commonly spoken dialect among the local Chinese population. Between the ages of four and six, I was sent to two kindergartens, one where teaching was done entirely in English and the other where teaching was done entirely in Mandarin Chinese. The principal and proprietor of the first kindergarten was apparently an educator-entrepreneur of Singaporean-Jewish extract while the teachers were mainly wives of British expatriates and British army personnel (see Singapore Press Holdings, 1963). The children who attended the kindergarten came from the local as well as the expatriate community. Teaching was done entirely in a polished variety of English and the children were made to sing songs and recite nursery rhymes like âRing-a ring-a rosesâ and âLittle Jack Hornerâ. They were also told stories that featured characters like Goldilocks and Mother Goose. The kindergarten was housed in a colonial-style bungalow elevated from the ground, complete with high ceilings and airy louvers. The principal was driven to school in her Vauxhall Victor chauffeured by her faithful Malay syce before being let to alight from her vehicle at the elevated porch. The second kindergarten was one that was started by a group of very successful local Chinese businessmen who were either migrants from China or descendants of the same. Like the first, it was located in a decidedly middle-class area of suburban Singapore amongst sprawling landed homes (most Singaporeans lived in kampong houses or flatted tenements). Teaching was done entirely in Mandarin Chinese. It was in this kindergarten that I learnt to write my first Chinese characters in original as opposed to simplified script, as was prescriptively expected of children at that time.
From an all-too-early age, therefore, and even though I was not fully conscious or cognizant of it, I had to negotiate and in my own way, suffer, the mysteries and uncertainties of those mixed cultural spaces where colonization came into confrontation with the forces of decolonization and independence (the British were on their way out), where the Western bore down condescendingly on the local, and where quintessentially English-speakers came into uncomfortable contact with speakers of earthy vernaculars. There was also the sensitive matter of privilege at once juxtaposed with marginalization. I was privileged enough to be sent to a kindergarten where the colonials brought their children. Yet, it was at the same time an inexplicable alienation that I felt when Mrs. Grafton (not her real name) patronizingly told me to âpay attentionâ when I was not able to answer a question which for some inscrutable reason she had singled me out to answer, which I recall was about some momentous event in the tragic story of the Gingerbread man.
My reason for relating the above details is to provide the reader with an outline of the mix of environments that I was exposed to as a child which eventually melded into an even wider range of hybridized experiences as an adult and more so as an educator. I am helped by the observations in Gagne, Herath, and Valencia (2018) who highlight the transformative value of looking at human narrative, formative life experiences (of race, class, religion) and the intersectional nature of their links with social justice, inclusion and exclusion, empowerment and marginalization. My work as English teacher and teacher-trainer would eventually take me to schools and learning centers in different parts of the Asia-Pacific including Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, Laos, Brunei, Hong Kong and eventually Japan. The time (or timing) of my writing of the drafts of the various chapters of this book is also significant. The book was started towards the tail end of my almost nine-year stay in Kanto Japan. Finally moving out from Japan, a principally monolingual society (although things are changing but [n]ever so slowly), my next landfall was polyglot Singapore with its four official languages (English, Mandarin, Malay and Tamil) and fascinating combinations, variants and variations of so many more. This change was significant because of the way it reacquainted me with linguistic and cultural diversity after having lived away from the country for nearly 14 years.
Multilingualism, Language Ideologies and the Call to Critical Reflexivity
I write this book as a career educator, having taught for practically all of my professional life (see Oda & Toh, 2018) a putatively reified construct or invention, which scholars continue to call English. In speaking about English in this manner, I do not mean to be circumlocutious, facetious or pedantic. After three decades of involvement in language education, I am now all the more concerned over the growing awareness that in many respects, the way fellow educators and I have understood such a notion or figment called language has increasingly been the subject of scrutiny for its constructed, contingent and largely non-autonomous, non-preexistent nature (e.g. Garcia, 2009; Makoni & Pennycook, 2007, 2012; Otheguy, Garcia, & Reid, 2015; Pennycook, 2007). After this many years of teaching âproperâ norm-regulated English, and challenged now with destabilized codes, norms and conventions that teachers have been faithfully relying on (Kramsch, 2014), like Canagarajah (2007), I am now more than a little inclined to (re)cast my thoughts to a time when people around me were unpretentiously, spontaneously and creatively translanguaging in the fluidly hybrid spaces that I knew as a child. In so doing, I am seeking for ways of understanding what could be the many happenings (subjective, symbolic, semiotic, ideological, etc.) in the multilingual multilingua franca interactions one sees today in web and workplace, at once instantiating and inhabiting those physical, cyber and virtual interactive spaces that they do. With regard to the matter of hybridity in language, my own hybridized multilingual background and experience of marrying cross-culturally to a Japanese national compel me also to take seriously Kramschâs (2014) observation of the exponentially increasing âpossibilities of making meaning by switching and...