Professional Relevance in a Multilingual World RITA SILVER National Institute of Education Singapore Ⅲ In renewing my TESOL membership for 2008, I noted that the membership letter stated that TESOL is a “global professional organization for English language educators.” This was of particular interest as I prepared for TESOL’s Bilingual Education Interest Section 2008 session titled “Imagining Multilingual TESOL,” because on a global scale, English language educators are crucially interested in multilingualism However, being relevant to English language educators in different parts of the world is a tall order which requires that TESOL address differences as well as commonalities in international teaching contexts (e.g., culturally embedded teacher and student roles, class size, availability of resources) Is it possible to so? Can we be relevant both globally and locally? I would like to address these questions with specific reference to multilingualism and second language learning When I use the term multilingualism throughout this article, I mean it to include learning of two or more languages A quick look at our organizational history shows that there has been a predominant interest in English teaching and learning in the United States, but also a continuing concern with English teaching worldwide In TESOL Quarterly’s first issue, H B Allen (1967) introduced three concerns for research in TESOL: teaching English overseas, teaching English to foreign students in the United States, and teaching English as a second language (ESL) to U.S residents, many of them U.S citizens (pp 4–5) Along with this bifocal view (national and international), there have been consistent attempts to consider theoretical foundations and pedagogical adaptations for second language and foreign language contexts What is often missing from these attempts is recognition that in all cases, second and foreign language learning involves multilinguals or emergent multilinguals (see García, this issue) Correspondingly, though many educators tend to categorize themselves as ESL, EFL (English as a foreign language), or bilingual teachers, all ESL/EFL teachers are fundamentally teachers of multilingualism TESOL’s Bilingual Education Interest Section (BEIS) was one of the earliest interest sections to be established However, it is somewhat ironic that TESOL has a bilingual education interest section at all, as if bilingualism is not at the heart of all we Currently it is clear (at least from the point of view of one who works outside of the United States, 332 TESOL QUARTERLY and indeed outside of Kachru’s [1982, 1985] inner circle) that one consequence of focusing discussion on ESL/EFL teaching rather than multilingual education, and on second language learners rather than developing multilinguals, is that teachers around the globe not always see TESOL as relevant to their immediate pedagogical concerns Key educational concerns in many contexts are for multilingual development and not second or foreign language learning Singapore, for example, is a multilingual society with four official languages (English, Mandarin, Malay, and Tamil) and a variety of other languages used in different social settings Bilingual education in this society is understood to be the teaching of English plus one other official language in clearly delineated curricular time slots, with the goal of developing communicative competence in at least two official languages for intraethnic and international communication (e.g., Pakir, 1993, 1994; Silver, 2005) When children begin primary school, they might come from homes in which the dominant language is one of the so-called Mother Tongues (Mandarin, Malay, Tamil), another language variety (e.g., Cantonese, Gujerati, Teochew), or English Frequently home language use includes more than one language, especially in intergenerational living situations When English is one of the home languages, it may be the localized variety known as Singlish Although English has been designated as the first language of schooling (i.e., the dominant language used in school), Singapore is usually considered to be an ESL learning environment (Foley, 2001) However, the ESL label is by no means a complete or comfortable way of describing this multilingual context For example, in a 2-year study of English teaching in primary school (Silver, 2008), three Primary Year teachers in the same school described their different groups of students: Felicia: Many of the students in my class use English at home They might also use Mother Tongue but I think it is mostly English Maya: For my class I think only around one third speaks English at home The rest are speaking Chinese or Malay And they are not good For my class, actually, they are not good in their English language skills Amanda: Yeah I, I think they speak English ah, yeah Ah, but it’s, it’s really broken English In this setting, English classes are not for ESL students but for every student, all studying with the same syllabus, the same teaching materials, and the same standardized tests regardless of proficiency level or home language background Planning to teach this diverse population in a unified system with an overarching national policy of developing bilingualism must go beyond considerations of teaching ESL SYMPOSIUM: IMAGINING MULTILINGUAL TESOL 333 These teachers tend to feel that both pedagogy- and research-oriented publications based on other teaching settings are somewhat irrelevant, because the crucial features of the Singapore environment are not taken into account First, Singapore has a long standing bilingual educational policy for all state-supported schools Although implementing bilingual education programs is contentious in some countries, in Singapore it is intrinsic to the system As one teacher educator recently noted: “In Singapore, bilingualism is viewed very positively and the language and education policies attest to this fact, but in the U.S., bilingualism is viewed rather negatively where bilinguals are considered to be problematic since they are assumed to have problems with coping well in school since English is their second language” (EE Ling Low, personal communication, June 9, 2008) Second, teachers are concerned with effectively implementing a national English language arts curriculum which culminates in high-stakes national testing for all students Third, there is linguistic diversity in the student population, home–school language differences for many students and prevalent home use of a localized variety of English (Singlish) which is considered to be nonstandard and inappropriate for educational and professional purposes (Foley, 1998; Rubdy, 2007) Each of these concerns has parallels in other countries Internationally, teachers are skeptical of the relevance of ideas from the United States or the United Kingdom because they see these sorts of contextual differences as being integral to their teaching In particular, TESOL is seen as an organization (and perhaps as a profession) more interested in second language learning than multilingualism As noted at the beginning of this discussion, one issue for professional relevance internationally is whether TESOL can address both global and local concerns However, another part of the relevance issue is the fundamental question of who we are and what goal we want our students to attain: English competence or multilingual competence? For many teachers and students, multilingual competence is of paramount importance in a globalized world THE AUTHOR Rita Elaine Silver is an associate professor in English language and literature at the National Institute of Education (NIE), in Singapore She also works in the Centre for Research in Pedagogy and Practice at NIE Her current research is on the use of peer work to enhance language learning in the context of Singaporean primary schools, teacher language awareness, and pedagogical innovation Through her research and her work as a teacher trainer in Singapore, she is also interested in policy implementation in and around bilingualism as well as issues of ‘standard’ language varieties and how that influences perceptions of language proficiency and identity 334 TESOL QUARTERLY REFERENCES Allen, H B (1967) TESOL and the journal TESOL Quarterly, 1, 3–6 Foley, J A (1998) Language in the school In J A Foley, T Kandiah, Z Bao, A F Gupta, L Alsagoff, H C Lick et al (Eds.), English in new cultural contexts: Reflections from Singapore (pp 244–269) Oxford: Oxford University Press Foley, J A (2001) Is English a first or second language in Singapore? In V B Y Ooi (Ed.), Evolving identities: The English language in Singapore and Malaysia (pp 12–32) Singapore: Times Academic Press Kachru, B (Ed.) (1982) The other tongue—English across cultures Urbana: University of Illinois Press Kachru, B (1985) Standards, codification and sociolinguistic realism: The English language in the outer circle In R Quirk & H G Widdowson (Eds.), English in the world: Teaching and learning the language and literatures (pp 11–36) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press for The British Council Pakir, A (1993) Two tongue tied: Bilingualism in Singapore Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 14, 73–90 Pakir, A (1994) English in Singapore: the codification of competing norms In S Gopinathan, A Pakir, H W Kam, & V Saravanan (Eds.), Language, society and education in Singapore (2nd ed.; pp 63–84) Singapore: Times Academic Press Rubdy, R (2007) Singlish in the school: An impediment or a resource? Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 28, 308–324 Silver, R (2005) The discourse of linguistic capital: Language and economic policy planning in Singapore Language Policy, 34, 47–66 Silver, R E (2008) Peer work, peer talk and language acquisition in Singapore primary classrooms (final report) Singapore: Centre for Research in Pedagogy and Practice, National Institute of Education English in Globalisation, a Lingua Franca or a Lingua Frankensteinia? ROBERT PHILLIPSON Copenhagen Business School Copenhagen, Denmark Ⅲ TESOL declares that it is a global organization The expansion of foreign and second language learning worldwide from the 1950s spawned different associations, as Fishman (this issue) documents at a time when U.S ambitions were global Troike wrote in 1977 of “large amounts of government and private foundation funds in the period 1950–1970, perhaps the most ever spent in history in support of the propagation of a language” (p 2); Alatis and Straehle (1997) confirmed that “by the 1960s, TESOL had truly become a worldwide endeavour” (p 11) The United States and United Kingdom were partners and rivals in promoting English and approaches to its learning worldwide (Phillipson, 1992, chapter 6) Alatis SYMPOSIUM: IMAGINING MULTILINGUAL TESOL 335