Part 1: Teacher as a Linguistic and Cultural Being
The story of my linguistic background begins at the foot of my parents, as I watched and listened
to the stories they would read me. Mine was a family that prized academic skills, and I am ever grateful
for that fact. My own comfort with the English language is most likely a result of countless hours spent
with a good book, from Star Wars fan fiction to the works of financial guru, Warren Buffet. Indeed,
there have been many times, both as a child and an adult, that books have provided my only contact to
my own language, a life-line to my culture, if you will. Since those early years at my parents’ feet, I have
become fluent in Spanish, and made a start on becoming proficient with Japanese, although to state my
linguistic background as such is a gross over-simplification that overlooks all of the wonderful intricacies
of language, and the effects that those learning experiences have had on my identity.
My ability in Spanish is proficient today, and relatively well-rounded, although that was not
always the case. I was eleven years old when my family first moved to Santiago, Chile, and I had never
attempted to learn another language. At first, my spoken Spanish was much stronger than my listening,
reading and writing. While I certainly learned a lot of vocabulary and basic grammar from my Spanish
class, the majority of my communicative competence came from negotiating meaning outside the
classroom on a daily basis, and my speech patterns came to resemble the informal language of my
classmates more than the formal structures taught in the Spanish classroom. Most of the formal
structures we were taught were in the form of grammar worksheets and very short writing assignments,
so I found it expedient to simply learn what would please my teacher rather than understand how I
could begin to apply those forms independently. Especially in Chile, the difference between the formal
and informal language was vast, as formal language favors the standard international form, whereas the
dialect spoken in the street was Castellano, which is characterized by its heavy reduction of final affix
sounds and the omission of certain syllables within words, which made it especially difficult for me to
remember different verb conjugations that were never articulated when they were used orally. I can
recall being rebuked by one of my Chilean classmates for using the informal form with a teacher, when I
had in fact been attempting to “clean up” my street Spanish and articulate the full sounds of words, only
to over-apply the rule and mistakenly present myself as disrespectful. The effort to turn my spoken
Castellano into appropriate formal writing was therefore fraught with challenges that I did not, in fact,
address properly until my university degree.
The skills I developed in university Spanish classes were markedly different from those I
acquired from being immersed in a Spanish speaking environment. Perhaps most notably, I was
required to read texts in archaic Spanish that required advanced reading strategies I had not developed
at that point. Also, we were required to write 10-to-20-page critical essays on those works, which
required that I learned stylistic devices specific to different genres, comparable perhaps to the passive
voice that occurs in scientific writing in the English language. Lastly, over the course of those four years,
I developed a specialized lexicon for discussing literature, issues of social justice, and gender relations
within an academic group setting. Having not practiced my Spanish consistently since graduation, I
notice my skills in all four areas are slightly rusty, but I am aware that my listening and speaking skills are
coming back to me very quickly, while I am having to work harder on my writing.
My Japanese skills, on the other hand, are very basic. I have never formally studied the
language the way I studied Spanish, but nevertheless I have developed a very basic level of
communicative competency through independent study and exposure to the language. Because I
worked in an English only environment while living in Japan, such exposure was very limited, but the
activities I engaged in outside of work had a huge effect on the language I acquired passively. Of course,
having a wife who is a Japanese native speaker has helped me to internalize many of the phrases, words,
and sounds that one is likely to hear in domestic contexts. Similarly, since my Japanese friends and I
often played poker together, I have developed some basic counting skills, and can construct basic
sentences to comment on appearance, express emotions, as well as functional language such as
ordering food and asking for different kinds of information. However, I must emphasize that I do not
consider this communicative competence to constitute literacy in any way. Unlike Spanish, the Japanese
orthographic system is vastly different from the English alphabet, and while I am able to recognize
certain of the most common characters, such as “exit” or “yen”, I cannot yet read or write Japanese as a
meaningful system, nor can I draw on my knowledge of the language to negotiate any but the most
simple and basic situations. Truthfully, most of my meaning in a Japanese conversation is still
negotiated through (or at least supplemented by) body language, which, thanks to many years teaching
English as an additional language, has become a very efficient mode of communication for me. I am
especially interested in how meaning is communicated non-verbally across cultures, and have read
several books on the subject, among which are my favorites by Desmond Morris.
Working in the ESL environment has had a truly transformative effect on me, both on my
perception of language itself and the way I identify myself as a cultural being. With regard to my
linguistic identity, it has opened my eyes to an amazing array of embedded concepts and beliefs that I
had previously been unaware of. For example, through explaining the meaning and use of the perfect
tense, I inadvertently stumbled over the concept of finished versus unfinished time that exists in English
but is alien to many other languages, particularly Asian languages. I had no idea that my mind, by way
of my linguistic programming, was automatically framing messages within a finished/unfinished
dichotomy, but now that I am aware of this I find it endlessly fascinating to pay attention to which
grammatical choice native speakers make with relation to the way they want to convey their message.
On a cultural level, working among so many unique, diverse and intelligent people has had the
effect of causing me to constantly challenge the assumptions I make when I define myself. The cultural
inheritance I received from my parents is a large part of the person I have become, but the effect of
living among other cultures for so many years is hard to ignore. While many people in Canada may
consider Caucasians to be the dominant race and culture, for example, I have never seen myself that
way. Even before I left Canada as a child, my classes were very racially and culturally mixed, and upon
arrival in Santiago, I actually became the minority, both in the larger societal context and also within the
Caucasian subculture in the school; being one of only a handful of Canadians, I found myself often
excluded from the shared cultural knowledge of my American classmates, and had trouble fitting in
despite our superficial and linguistic similarities. In Trinidad, my white skin marked me as an outsider,
and occasionally attracted the wrong kind of attention. In Japan, my racial identity merely set me apart,
which on one hand gave me a kind of social “get out of jail free card”, as foreigners in Japan aren’t held
to the same high standards as nationals, but on the other hand often positioned a barrier between
myself and the culture.
In every place that I have lived, though, the relationships that I have forged with other travelers
and locals serve as a constant reminder to me of the potential that exists for people of all value systems,
religions and cultural backgrounds to create positive and meaningful relationships, despite barriers such
as language and ideological foreignness. This approach to cultural diversity has led to many of the major
decisions in my life, such as my relationship with my wife, who is Japanese and with whom my ability to
communicate was minimal throughout the early stages of our relationship. Negotiating meaning across
different cultures is something that we both do daily, and is an interesting process of discovery as we
compare and analyze the cultural beliefs we were raised with. As I grow and mature, as a person and as
a teacher, I intend to extend this critical awareness to the contexts that I operate in with the belief that
my inquiry has the potential to improve the quality of both my relationships and my teaching practices.