ELT slogans

There’s a wonderful promotional video for Pearson English https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6o1s8U88N8 that packs as many clichéd slogans and images into one minute as you could ever wish for. Here’s the script:

Great things happen when you dare to dream / Learning is a journey filled with challenge, wonder and discovery / Educators not only inspire the future they also define it / We partner with the learning community to change futures / It’s our passion / Together we can inspire / Together we can empower / Together we can achieve / Change is happening all around us, faster than ever / Let’s empower change / There’s an exciting future ahead / Expect great things / Pearson English / Dare to learn, dare to change / Pearson always learning

How futures will be changed, what exactly can be inspired or empowered, what great things we can expect, what we might dare to learn or change – all these minor details are left unanswered. It is a wonderful example of advertising language, aka bullshit, defined by philosopher Harry Frankfurt (2005) as discourse that is only intended to persuade, without any concern for truth. It’s language where meanings are not shared, but where emotional responses are desired.

Pearson refers to its slogan ‘Always learning’ as their ‘brand tagline’. It is, they say, ‘Short, bold, and memorable, “Always Learning” encapsulates our learners and ourselves. It highlights Pearson’s commitment to constantly be discovering, learning and improving ourselves. And it describes what we enable our learners to do–to keep learning, whenever, wherever and however it suits them, throughout every stage of their lives’. The company provides detailed advice to its employees about how the slogan can be used: when, where, when not, colour combinations, good and bad examples of use, translations, etc. All of this makes for fascinating reading, which, strangely, is available online (at least, for the time being!).

Bullshit is a wise approach in advertising ELT products. If you get too specific / meaningful, you run the risk of coming out with bullshit of the non-philosophical kind. Macmillan English, for example, has the new slogan ‘Advancing learning’ and says: As technology opens new doors for teachers and students, we use our expertise to create products that suit different learning styles and design innovative new tools for teachers and students.

With ELT conference season getting underway in some parts of the world, slogans, clichés and buzzwords are vying for our attention in the marketing of these events. There are ELT conferences of a commercial, predatory kind (‘guaranteed publication of your work in the conference proceedings’) where the slogans are clearly bullshit (in the philosophical sense). The upcoming ‘4^th International Conference on Modern Research in Education, Teaching and Learning’ (22 – 24 April in Barcelona) has the marvellous slogan ‘The only of all English language teaching conference’ and can be attended for only €320 (much cheaper if you just want to listen without presenting).

But for conferences organised by teachers’ associations, it would be inaccurate and inappropriate to describe their choice of slogans as bullshit. This doesn’t mean, however (as an entertaining blog post at ELT Rants, Reviews and Reflections in 2015 described them), that they are not ‘buzzword-heavy word salads [that] are rinsed, re-used, and repeated ad nauseum’. Here’s a small current selection for you to take your pick from. The resemblance, in many cases, to the language of the Pearson promo video is striking.

ELT in the digital era and beyond: innovation, engagement, and resilience (ThaiTESOL)

The hybrid transition: emotional, social and educational impacts on language learning (TESOL Kuwait)

Connecting teachers, empowering learners (BBELT)

Innovating changes: a world of diversity (TESOL Spain)

Translanguaging and multilingualism in language teaching (TESOL Arabia)

Inspiring collaboration (BELTA)

For me, the standout slogan is definitely TESOL Arabia, since it is the only one that seems to be about something specific. But perhaps I’m wrong. Both translanguaging and multilingualism can mean quite a few different things. When you put the terms together, my thoughts turn first to questions of social justice, and the idea of a conference in which social justice is discussed in the Hyatt Regency hotel in Dubai is fairly surreal. As in most of these examples, conferences for ELT teachers tend to opt for broad themes which aim to include almost everyone in the field (Raza, 2018) and will usually index innovation, excellence, empowerment, and / or wellbeing.

A good slogan will include words that are themselves sloganized (Schmenk et al., 2019). ‘Innovation’ and ‘empowering’ are good examples here. Neither can truly be understood without familiarity with extensive co-texts which confer connotational meaning and rhetorical force. ‘Change’ (for ‘innovation’) and ‘helping’ (for ‘empowering’) don’t quite have the same heft, even though they basically mean the same.

It’s important that buzzwords don’t mean too much, but the ‘key processing features of successful slogans are simplicity, memorability and emotionality’ (Pavlenko, 2019: 146). By ‘emotionality’, Pavlenko means words that carry an upbeat / positive message. In this sense, TESOL Kuwait’s ‘emotional, social and educational impacts’ all sound rather neutral and academic. I think that ‘engagement, diversity and outcomes’ might resonate better. Similarly, ‘hybrid’ still needs to shake off some negative associations: ‘digital’ sounds more positively modern. Hats off to ThaiTESOL, whose ‘the digital era and beyond’ sounds positively visionary.

Even though slogans shouldn’t mean too much, they only work as slogans ‘as if their meaning were obvious’ (Schmenk et al., 2019: 4). In their exploration of sloganization in language education discourse, Schmenk et al (2019) look at ‘communicative language teaching’, ‘learner autonomy’, ‘innovation’, ‘multiple intelligences’, ‘intercultural / transcultural language learning’, ‘input’, ‘language commodification’ and ‘superdiversity’. In this blog, I’ve considered ‘innovation’, ‘resilience’, ‘translanguaging’ and ‘multilingualism’, among others. These buzzwords come and go – the field of language teaching is as keen on current trends as any other field – and they can usually be grouped into broader trends, which academics like to call ‘turns’. There’s the ‘social turn’ (Block, 2003), the ‘intercultural turn’ (Thorne, 2010), the ‘multilingual turn’ (May, 2013), the ‘critical turn’ (Dasli & Diáz, 2017), the ‘emotional turn’ (White, 2018), and these are just for starters. If you’re quick, you won’t be too late to register for the 2^nd International Conference on Linguistic, Literary and Pedagogical Turns at the University of Wah. The conference doesn’t have a slogan, but my suggestion would be ‘The Turn Turn’.

Schmenk et al (2019: 3) note that language education is an inherently interdisciplinary field so it is not surprising to find so many of its current trends drawn from other disciplines. This has not always been the case. If we go back 30 / 40 years, the hot topics included corpora, task-based learning, and lexical approaches. Now, in the choice of slogans, ELT conferences are not dissimilar from other professional conferences in sales and marketing, management and leadership – see for example this website offering advice about organising such events.

Slogans and buzzwords are, of course, a marketing tool for ELT conferences and publishers, but they also play an important role in academic branding – the personal brand you construct for yourself as an academic. Aneta Pavlenko (2019: 1488 – 151) offers a useful set of strategies for this kind of academic branding, but similar strategies can also be used by ELT freelancers

• Adopt a slogan / buzzword (simple, memorable and positive)
• Link it to your work (easiest if it was either your idea in the first place or you were one of the first to import the idea into language education)
• Institutionalize the slogan by organising conferences, courses, journals, supervising dissertations, and so on
• Recycle the slogan endlessly (especially in the titles of publications)
• Keep things pretty vague so you can’t be criticised too much
• Frame the phenomenon in question with words like ‘radical’, ‘unprecedented’, ‘hugely complex’, ‘tremendously important’

Quoting the work of Michael Billig (2013), Pavlenko (2019: 160) suggests that we should not necessarily be asking ourselves what slogans and buzzwords mean. A better question is: what is the person who is using these words attempting to do with them?

My favourite ELT slogan is an anti-slogan slogan. It is Bo Cai Zhong Chang (‘assimilating merits of different teaching approaches for our own use’) which was used in China to advocate for a ‘methodological approach appropriate to the specific sociopolitical realities of the country’ (Feng & Feng, 2001). China has a long history of powerful slogans, of course, with ‘Dare to think, dare to act’ being the key phrase during the Great Leap Forward. Did the people at Pearson have this in mind when they came up with ‘Dare to learn, dare to change’?

References

Billig, M. (2013) Learn to Write Badly: How to Succeed in the Social Sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Block, D. (2003) The Social Turn in Second Language Acquisition. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press

Dasli, M. & Diáz, A. R. (Eds.) (2017) The Critical Turn in Language and Intercultural Communication Pedagogy. New York: Routledge

Feng, A. & Feng, A. (2001) ‘Bo Cai Zhong Chang’ – A slogan for effective ELT methodology for College English education. English Language Teaching, 1: 1 – 22

Frankfurt, H. G. (2005) On Bullshit. Princeton: Princeton University Press

May. S. (Ed.) (2013) The multilingual turn: Implications for SLA, TESOL and Bilingual education. New York: Routledge

Pavlenko, A. (2019) Superdiversity and Why It Isn’t: Reflections on Terminological Innovation and Academic Branding. In Schmenk, B., Bredibach, S. & Küster, L. (Eds.) Sloganization in Language Education Discourses. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. pp. 142 – 168.

Raza, K. (2018) The Alignment of English Language Teacher Association Conference Themes to Research Agendas: An Investigation of TESOL International Association and IATEFL. In A. Elsheikh et al. (Eds.), The Role of Language Teacher Associations in Professional Development, Second Language Learning and Teaching. Cham: Springer pp. 117 – 129

Schmenk, B., Bredibach, S. & Küster, L. (Eds.) (2019) Sloganization in Language Education Discourses. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.

Thorne, S. L. (2010) The ‘Intercultural Turn’ and Language Learning in the Crucible of the New Media. In Helm, F. & Guth, S. (Eds.) Telecollaboration 2.0 for Language and Intercultural Learning. Bern: Peter Lang. pp. 139 – 164

White C.J. (2018) The Emotional Turn in Applied Linguistics and TESOL: Significance, Challenges and Prospects. In: Martínez Agudo J. (Eds) Emotions in Second Language Teaching. Cham: Springer

Multilingualism, linguanomics and lingualism

You have probably heard the following joke, or a version of it. What do we call a person who speaks three languages? A trilingual. And a person who speaks two languages? A bilingual. And someone who only speaks one language? An American. For the joke to work, even mildly, the listener has to buy in to the idea that multilingualism / plurilingualism is a ‘good thing’, and that too many Americans are monolingual.
Not everybody would share these views. Some would prefer the US (and other countries of immigration) to be more of a language graveyard than less of one. Negativity about multilingualism can be extreme, as in the wrath of those on Twitter who found a Coca Cola advertisement profoundly un-American, supportive of communism and terrorism. The advert in question showed a multicultural bunch of people sharing a Coke in perfect harmony while singing a multilingual rendition of ‘America the Beautiful’. To make things even worse, the commercial was shown at that homage to all things American, the Super Bowl.
Enthusiasm for multilingualism is, in part, a liberal reaction to the reactionary monolingualism of the ‘if-you-can’t-speak-our-language-go-back-to-your-own-fucking-country’ variety. Countering the post- 9/11 rise in monolingual linguistic prescriptivism in some countries (Cameron, 2013), tolerant multilingualism indexes visions of perfectly harmonious communities and the rhetoric of human rights and autonomy (Gramling, 2016: 205). It values diversity for its own sake.
It is also, in part, a reaction (see, for example, the Wikipedia entry or Maher, 2017) to a number of clearly widespread myths and misconceptions (e.g. that multilingual societies are less harmonious than monolingual ones or that bilingually raised children are cognitively disadvantaged). Going further than mere rebuttals, advocates of multilingualism argue, with some evidence, that it is good for critical and creative thinking, beneficial for problem-solving and decision-making, makes us more open to new ideas, more tolerant, more embracing of divergent thinking, and it can help stave off dementia. What is there not to like?
Most enthusiasts of multilingualism will list and expand on all the advantages of multilingualism that I have already mentioned, but many will also be interested in its market potential. Linguanomics, the title of a book by Gabrielle Hogan-Brun (2017), is the exploration of the economic aspects of multilingualism, the links between linguistic diversity and economic growth, and the ways in which linguistic capital may be converted into monetary capital. Citing Hogan-Brun, a blog post (Hardach, 2018; see also Hardach, 2021) for the World Economic Forum suggests that companies which invest more in languages do better in export markets; that countries with better language skills have higher GDP; and, therefore, countries should do more to tap the ‘vast, linguistic resource [of] migrant families’. Diversity has become human capital. Multilingualism is not just an end in itself, but a tool ‘in global collaborations to make the world a better place’ (Stein-Smith, 2021b) primarily through economic growth. In this framing, becoming multilingual (i.e. learning another language) is acquiring the ultimate 21st century skill (Stein-Smith, 2021a), so long, of course, as the language has value in the market place. English, for example.
Like all 21st century skills, multilingualism appears to have a readily obvious meaning, but does not, in fact, lend itself easily to a simple definition. Perhaps the defining feature of all 21st century skills is precisely the lack of precision, allowing the idea to be embraced by different people, from critical theorists to investment bankers, for different reasons. The European Commission (2007:6) defines the term as: ‘the ability of societies, institutions, groups and individuals to engage, on a regular basis, with more than one language in their day-to-day lives’. It leaves unanswered the key questions of what a language is, which languages are being referred to, and in which aspects of people’s day-to-day lives. But answers of a sort can be found when we look at the reasons for the European policy of multilingualism. In addition to the importance of diversity and respect for identities, the policy is intended (1) on a collective basis, to contribute to European unity (reflecting the EU’s motto ‘United in Diversity’) and (2) on an individual basis, to develop human capital and job mobility.
Can a policy of multilingualism be both a celebration of diversity and a tool for linguanomics – the development of human capital through languages? Problems arise when we look for the answer to the question of which language. Are we differentiating languages and dialects, and, if so, how? When the European Commission (2005: 4) says that it would like all European citizens to have ‘practical skills in at least two languages in addition to his or her mother tongue’, it’s fairly clear that this means ‘foreign languages’. And if part of the purpose of learning ‘foreign languages’ is to develop human capital, the language of choice is likely to be English most of the time. A particular kind of English. Closely related is the question of what is meant by ‘mother tongue’. If your home language is not the national language of the country in which you live, you’re unlikely to get much help from European states in developing your competencies in it. In practice, when development of human capital is weighed against diversity, the former takes precedence every time. Multilingualism in this European context is overridingly concerned with languages associated with nation states and is tied ‘to a future anterior of successful language learning among new citizens’ […] it ‘fulfils all the characteristics of neoliberal self-making: horizontal, voluntaristic, entrepreneurial, opportunity-rich, privatizable, decentralized, team-oriented, and, at turns hopeful or mute about structural poverty and other forms of socio-economic precaritization’ (Gramling, 2016: 204). In other words, interest in diversity may only be skin-deep: advocacy of multilingual policies may, in fact, be mostly about ‘targeting the anxiety within the [white, privileged, monolingual] majority about social and linguistic pluralism’ (McNamara, 2011: 38).
‘Language’, ‘diversity’ and ‘multilingualism’ are all strategically deployable shifters (Moore, 2015): their meanings shift in relation to the purposes for which the terms are being used. Multilingualism can stand in opposition to the bigotry of people in MAGA caps, but it can also stand in opposition to ‘unassimilated’ monolingual, migrant populations who haven’t learnt the language of the ‘host nation’. This is all rather problematic for those who do not want their espousal of multilingualism to be associated with xenophobia or a neoliberal agenda, and for those who want to dissociate diversity from human capital (Flores, 2013). Multilingualism, therefore, needs to be disambiguated, so that the multilingualism that is oriented towards social justice is not appropriated by those whose main interest in language learning is linguanomics (Katznelson & Bernstein, 2017).
This, I think, is what is behind the so-called ‘multilingual turn’ in applied linguistics, a turn that tries to bring social justice to the fore. In an attempt at terminological smash-and-grab, critical applied linguists set about reclaiming the term (May, 2013; Conteh & Meier, 2014). There are differences in interpretation between them (Meier, 2017), but the common denominator is a desire to redefine ‘language’ – not as a fixed and largely territorial system owned by native-speakers, but as a dynamic, complex, social, deterritorialized practice owned by its users. There is ample evidence to indicate that various forms of linguistic intermixing are more characteristic of everyday spoken communication than the orderly use of what we might call ‘monolanguages’ – separate, individual, named languages. The multilingualism of the multilingual turn contends that lingualism (Block, 2013) – the belief in the existence of monolanguages – is contrary to the evidence, and must be dispensed with in order to get away from the social injustice of native-speaker norms, of accentism, and linguistic prejudice.
In this light, the term ‘multilingual’ is problematic. It denotes countability and plurality. If we want or need to distance ourselves from lingualism – the idea of languages as bounded entities (e.g. English, Hebrew, Xhosa), ‘language’ needs to become a verb: ‘languaging’ or ‘translanguaging’ (see my previous post). The multilingual turn has led us to translanguaging and ‘few voices in applied linguistics have found fault with this positive counter-distinction of translanguaging over multilingualism’ (Gramling, 2021: 29). It is translanguaging, rather than multilingualism, that is now being offered as a, even the, theory of language (Li Wei, 2018).
For a strong critique of the idea that named languages (like English) do not exist, you could do worse than read a recent post by Geoff Jordan. Or you could simply try asking someone who’s about to take a TOEFL exam what they think of the idea (Gramling, 2021: 26). Even if we cannot clearly define the boundaries of what constitutes a named language like English, we cannot simply disinvent it. Our lives can be shaped by language exams, our online interactions are shaped by our choice of named language, and many of us invest a significant part of our identity in a named language. You may go along with Li Wei (2021) in disapproving of lingualism, but it won’t be going away any time soon. Quite how we are supposed to dispense with lingualism also remains less than clear. Perhaps Li Wei might begin by trying to get rid of the PGCE in Languages, or the MAs in TESOL or French at his own university, or its language proficiency requirements for students from countries that are not ‘majority English-speaking’. I suspect, though, that his institution’s linguanomic dispositive of multilingualism might prevent that happening.
Lingualism is at the heart of much English language learning, of English medium instruction, and of Li Wei’s own university (UCL) where nearly half the student body has paid to benefit from the linguistic capital that is on sale there. Lingualism may be (but is not necessarily) ‘indifferent to social justice, migration, asylum, refuge, immigration, decoloniality, or liberation from the strictures of monolingualism’ (Gramling, 2021: 66), but multilingualism of the translanguaging kind is unlikely to make much of a dent in our monolingualising world, either. It certainly isn’t going to help anyone who has to take a gate-keeping language test (Cameron, 2013). For all the noise about translanguaging in TESOL, it’s worth noting (Gramling, 2021: 70) that the overwhelming majority of current research into multilingualism comes, not from TESOL or applied linguistics, but from computational engineers and Natural Language Processing specialists. Compared to multilingual linguanomics, the ‘multilingual turn’ is a very niche affair. Most people have never heard of it, and never will.
Academic handbooks on multilingualism stretch to over a thousand pages, and there are countless journals devoted to the topic. Attempts have been made to condense the topic to 130 pages (Maher, 2017), and even 15 pages (Cenoz, 2015), but multilingualism is a discursive construct, a category in the process of continuous reinvention (Gramling, 2021). Discourses about monolingualism and multilingualism are what Deborah Cameron (2013) has called discourses of ‘verbal hygiene’ – the normative practices through which people attempt to improve languages or regulate their use. Such discourses, whether coming from xenophobes, neo-liberals, or those with more liberal perspectives, are:
linked to other preoccupations which are not primarily linguistic, but rather social, political and moral. The logic behind verbal hygiene depends on a tacit, common-sense analogy between the order of language and the larger social order; the rules or norms of language stand in for the rules governing social or moral conduct, and putting language to rights becomes a symbolic way of putting the world to rights (Cameron, 2013: 61).
Cameron adds that verbal hygiene is a response to the anxieties of a specific moment and place, and that we should be wary of assuming that preoccupations about, say, multilingualism and monolingualism will have the same symbolic meanings in different times and places. With that in mind, I know I need to be careful about the way I react to the writings of Li Wei, Ofelia García, Nelson Flores, or Guadalupe Valdés. Their professional worlds of the ‘multilingual turn’ in bilingual and immersion education in mostly English-speaking countries hardly intersect at all with my own professional world of EFL teaching in central Europe, where rejection of lingualism is not really an option.

References
Block, D. (2013) Moving beyond ‘Lingualism’: Multilingual embodiment and Multimodality in SLA. In May. S. (Ed.) (2013) The multilingual turn: Implications for SLA, TESOL and Bilingual education. New York: Routledge. pp. 54 – 77
Cameron, D. (2013) The one, the many, and the Other: Representing multi- and mono-lingualism in post-9/11 verbal hygiene. Critical Multilingualism Studies, 1 (2): 59 – 77
Cenoz, J. (2013) Defining multilingualism. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 33: 3 – 18
Conteh, J. & Meier, G. (Eds.) (2014) The multilingual turn in languages education: Opportunities and challenges. Bristol: Multilingual Matters
European Commission. (2007) Final report: High level group on multilingualism. Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European Communities
European Commission (2005) Communication from the Commission to the Council, the European Parliament, the Economic and Social Committee, and the Committee of the Regions. A New Framework Strategy for Multilingualism, COM(2005) 596 final. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:52005DC0596
Flores, N. (2013) The Unexamined Relationship Between Neoliberalism and Plurilingualism: A Cautionary Tale. TESOL Quarterly, 47 (3): 500- 520
Gramling, D. (2021) The Invention of Multilingualism. Cambridge: CUP
Gramling, D. (2016) The Invention of Monolingualism. New York: Bloomsbury
Hardach, S. (2018) Speaking more than one language can boost economic growth. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/02/speaking-more-languages-boost-economic-growth/
Hardach, S. (2021) Languages are Good for Us. London: Apollo Books
Hogan-Brun, G. (2017) Linguanomics: What is the Market Potential of Multilingualism? New York: Bloomsbury
Katznelson, N. & Bernstein, K. (2017) Rebranding Bilingualism: The Shifting Discourses of Language Education Policy in California’s 2016 Election. Linguistics and Education, 40: 11 – 26
Li Wei. (2021) Translanguaging as a Political Stance: Implications for English Language Education. ELT Journal, ccab083, https://doi.org/10.1093/elt/ccab083
Li Wei. (2018) Translanguaging as a Practical Theory of Language. Applied Linguistics, 39 (1): 9 – 30
Maher, J. C. (2017) Multilingualism: A very short introduction. Oxford: OUP
May. S. (Ed.) (2013) The multilingual turn: Implications for SLA, TESOL and Bilingual education. New York: Routledge
McNamara, T. (2011) Multilingualism in Education: A poststructuralist critique. The Modern Language Journal, 104 (1): 430 – 441
Meier, G. S. (2017) The multilingual turn as a critical movement in education: assumptions, challenges and a need for reflection. Applied Linguistics Review, 8 (1): 131-161
Moore, R. (2015) From revolutionary monolingualism to reactionary multilingualism: Top-down discourses of linguistic diversity in Europe, 1794-present. Language & Communication, 44: 19 – 30
Stein-Smith, K. (2021a) Multilingualism as a Global Competency: Skills for a 21st Century World. Saarbrücken: LAP Lambert Publishing
Stein-Smith, K. (2021b) Multilingualism for Global Solutions and a Better World. Journal of Language Teaching and Research, 12 (5): 671-677