Sapir-Whorf and Perceptions of English Language

Part 1, English Freedom

It’s another presentation at a Saturday conference and this time we’re sitting in a circle discussing the negotiation of second language identities. I mention to the participants and fellow presenters that my dissertation will examine perceptions of empowerment and queer identity facilitation via the learning and performance of English (as a semiotic act/space). Heads nod when I suggest that there is something about English and English speakers that reference a sense of freedom for many language learners outside the American context. I follow with the question, “But is it really English that allows for this freedom in alternative identities, or would any second language allow this?” The room offers a unanimous “It’s English.”

Give Mary Gods a Quid, Ya’All

“You sound like the operator,” I say through a large grin.

“What?”

“Like the operator…the woman in the phone!”

My mother looks at me for a moment and then asks, “Whadduya mean?”

“When you talk on the phone, you sound funny. Like the woman,” I reply.

She considers this and is about to say something when I interrupt, enunciating every syllable my 6 year-old voice utters:

“Hello, this is Anita Harrison, Marlen Harrison’s mother. Marlen will be absent from school today because he is ill.”

I stop for a moment and giggle. My mother begins to smile. I continue with my right-hand pinky at my mouth and my right-hand thumb placed to my ear…

“Please have his teacher send homework home with our neighbor Andrea Burns.” I mimic my mother’s telephone voice in a posh, female tone. I tell her, “You sound different when you talk on the phone.”

“I do?”

“Yeah! You try to sound fancy.”

The Problem of Evidence

“The problem of evidence consists of the tasks of making this fact intelligible” (Garfinkle, p. 103).

    While recently writing an autoethnography examining the semiotics of name in relation to experience, I consistently came across criticism of ethnographic research aimed at highlighting the problem of interpretation of evidence. Coffey (1999) explains that in ethnography the researcher, and his/her interpretive eye, is as much a part of the research as are the subjects being examined. This sentiments is echoed in Garfinkle’s (1976) exploration of the documentary method of sociological research and the problem of

What do we know about reading?

As usual, I’ll sabotage this question and turn it around a bit to reflect what I thought I knew about reading and to examine some of Smith’s ideas that I found most interesting. As has been my recent mode, while reading Smith I found myself thinking, “Geesh, I knew that, but I guess I never really gave it that much thought.” It’s an interesting commentary considering the subjects and theses of both Rosenblatt’s text and now Smith’s (and I was tickled to see nods to Rosenblatt throughout Chapter 4), both concerning reading, the reader, and understanding.

Sternberg’s approach to understanding the mind and cognition (Metaphors of the Mind) explored a number of metaphors. Smith does the same albeit with a slightly different approach. Chapter 1 begins with a section entitled “Reading the World” and concludes that “reading” itself is a metaphor for looking and understanding, i.e. interpreting facial expressions. Chapter 2 continues with metaphorical examinations by comparing the mind to the computer and introducing concepts for the mind such as script and schema. These concepts form an introduction to the idea that reading is more than mere recognition of letters on a page, phonemes, and representations of sounds; a heck of a lot of thinking and experience are involved in the process of making meaning via reading. One of the most interesting ideas Smith explores is that much of reading is prediction! I suppose it is. I’d go a step further and bring a little bit of my newly learned pragmatics vocabulary into this discussion and couple prediction with implication. As a reader, I must

The Ring of the Text

What is a text and where is it located?

 

“The reading of any work of literature is, of necessity, an individual and unique occurrence involving the mind and emotions of a particular reader.”

 

For at least 20 years or so, I have waited to read such an assertion, having always believed that standardized tests of reading comprehension were, to put it bluntly, ridiculous. How could an individual be assessed based upon his transformation of a piece of literature from a set of printed symbols to a situation with meaning? It always seemed that questions such as “What is the author’s main point?” were rife with the possibility for the reader to impose his own take on the main point. Or perhaps what it all comes down to is that I’m the kind of reader who is apt to taking over a text and imposing himself on it. Fowles, god love him, writes, “A sentences or paragraph in a novel will evoke a different image in each reader. This necessary co-operation between writer and reader, the one to suggest, the other to make concrete, is a privilege of verbal form” (in Rosenblatt, p. 15). Thank you, Mr. Fowles.

Letter to Achilles

Letter to Achilles

Hold fast,
breathe deeply,
tend to your armor, o warrior.

Your heart and I
will likely pummel you with waves of emotions,
soak you in stormy moods,
chill you with ice storms of thoughtless words,
and no doubt already have.

Good Teaching

 

What is good teaching?

 

Good teaching – oh the word “good” just doesn’t mean anything, now does it – effective teaching is….And what about “effective”? How is THAT defined?

 

George Mitchell challenged me, pushed me, and he did so not-too-gently. He told me I could be a different writer and was relentless in showing me how. But so was I, relentless in my desire to at first please, but then later, just to explore and experiment. His authority was one that I felt safe deferring to. Religion, literature, history, psychology all slowly merged into a two-year journey of both the world and my place in it, with Mr. Mitchell as my guide. At a towering 6 feet so many inches, his balding pate and baritone bravado commanded the classroom. It was a thrill just to be there.

Making Meaning Matter

“The wider intellectual community comes increasingly to ignore our [psychology] journals, which seem to outsiders principally to contain intellectually unsituated little studies, each a response to a handful of like little studies. Inside psychology, there is a worried restlessness about the state of our discipline, and the beginning of a new search for means of reformulating it. In spite of the prevailing ethos of “neat little studies,” and of what Gordon Allport once called methodolatry, the great psychological questions are being raised once again — questions about the nature of mind and its processes, questions about how we construct our meanings and our realities, questions about the shaping of mind by history and culture.” (Acts of Meaning, xi)

A Story Worth Preserving

“But you know your mother really wanted you,” said Connie, seemingly hurt by what I was saying. I was standing in her living room, emphatically yelling and complaining about my parents, listing a litany of hurts that to my 18 year old mind were cruel and harsh wrongdoings. “And another thing,” I would continue. So much anger, so much that I needed to get out of my head, only words and emotion would do.

I thought about what Connie had said, it hadn’t registered at first, my mind a rushing locomotive racing full speed ahead, unable to stop for anything, but – “Your mother really wanted you.” Connie sat on the petite pink sofa, her habitual evening cocktail in hand, Bam-Bam by her side watching me. Her words were only slightly slurred, but I knew she was on her way to that special place. It was autumn, and it was night. A storm was coming, a cold front perhaps. The leaves did not fall to the ground from their branches, they were ripped from them. The lights were on in the kitchen, the television was chatting away. I can see the scene as if I’m sitting in an audience, eyes upon the stage. There’s a pleading look on my face as if to say “See what I mean? You do understand what I’m telling you, don’t you?” But it was Connie who really owned that sentiment, now squeezed into a bullet and shot directly at me in the form of “But you know your mother really wanted you.”

I stopped talking and looked at her, the television the only sound now. Headlights from outside entered the far window of the living room – someone was parking a car, someone had arrived home no doubt eager to enter his home and take refuge from the impending storm outside.

to be continued…

but i AM a writer

“but i AM a writer” – Marlen attempts to define what a “writer” is and finds that perhaps he might just be one.

“A writer is a person who creates novels – a writer is a storyteller,” or so I’ve always thought. Of course I understood that there were other kinds of writers – journalists, reporters and documentarians, biographers and playwrights, but these identities never really held much importance for me…they didn’t register. No, a writer is a storyteller. True, I told stories, and for school, I wrote stories in my journal. I even enjoyed this process. And so despite the fact that adolescence had indeed called on me to be a writer, crafting stories, profiles, or “vignettes” as I liked to think of them, I somehow didn’t assume the identity. My stories weren’t very well developed, more like descriptions of brief moments in time; I felt that this was my unique brand of expression and liked to share my creativity with friends, but still hoped to one day be a real writer, not merely a writer in the worlds of my journal.