Definition essay of my bilingual self (Tun Min)

By referring to explanations of dimensions of bilingualism by Baker (2011, p. 3-4), I define myself as a “productive - receptive - dominant - sequential - ascendant - bicultural - circumstantial” bilingual. The following will be an elaboration of the labels and an account of the reasons for such labels to define myself as a bilingual self which will be supported with evidence from research literature.

According to Grosjean (as cited in Baker, 2011), a bilingual is an individual who uses “two or more languages (or dialects)” (p.4) in his or her normal life. Personally speaking, I normally use two languages, viz., Myanmar and English, and one Myanmar dialect called Arakanese. Hence, I speak more than two languages. Although I know Myanmar well and the dialect Arakanese not well by literacy but effectively by oracy, I have to admit that my mastery in English is unequal in four language skills. From maximalist point of view, I am aware of the fact that I do not yet have “the native-like control” (Bloomfield, as cited in Baker, 2011, p. 8) of English, my second language. Therefore, I define myself as “dominant” in Myanmar rather than in English. In this regard, it is deemed appropriate to make a comparison of Japanese society with Myanmar context regarding second language teaching in order to see its effect on individual bilingualism. Toh (2014, p. 305) asserts that Japanese are strongly nationalistic and that the use of English or sight of foreigners incites the Japanese. Similarly, I have observed that Myanmar people are also quite strongly nationalistic and have to use Myanmar language as a medium of instruction at schools as well as at universities. This seems to affect Myanmar people’s mastery of English, the second language, the way the Japanese people suffer. In fact, this societal nature of bilingualism in Myanmar has seemed to make me as a Myanmar dominant bilingual self.

Since I can speak and write as well as understand and read in both Myanmar and English, I also define myself as a “productive - receptive” bilingual. As part of my bilingual self, I will touch on code-switching (CS) and translanguaging with my personal reflection. Some people in my environment are code-switchers. Sometimes, I also - consciously or unconsciously - use CS while speaking in Myanmar. It makes me feel more to-the-point and effective in most instances. However, I am quite careful not to use code-switching with my teachers as some of them openly criticize others using CS. They even explicitly encourage the latter to use only one language - English or Myanmar - at a time. According to Wei and Wu (as cited in Dewaele & Wei, 2014, p. 237), such an attitude shows an opposition to CS. By research using data collected via an online questionnaire, however, Dewaele and Wei (2014) deduces that lower levels of emotional stability and higher levels of Tolerance of Ambiguity and Cognitive Empathy all lead to having “a more positive attitude towards CS” (p. 246). Hence, I now realize that CS is not a bad habit but a good normal one for bilinguals. Regarding tanslanguaging, Wei (2011) examines the notion of translanguaging space embodying the concepts of creativity and criticality with three Chinese-English bilinguals in Britain, around several themes including “fun with words” (pp. 1226-1227). As a significant example of translanguaging, young Myanmar people sometimes say “LOL” (laughing out loud) to mean “Fuck!” in Myanmar since the pronunciation of “LOL” which they think is close to the sound “Low” conveys that abusive meaning in Myanmar.

I also define myself as a “sequential” bilingual as my mother tongue is Arakanese dialect and I had to start learning Myanmar and English in my kindergarten when I was about five years old. In their longitudinal study of Vietnamese-English bilinguals concerning their sentence interpretation, Pham and Ebert (2016, p. 482) found that although those bilingual children initially use a combination of animacy and word order cues to make sense of a sentence, they later come to exclusively use word order cues for sentence interpretation. I agree with their finding in my context because I also had to use animacy and word order cues to understand a sentence in Myanmar and English in my early years but gradually shifted reliance from a combination to exclusive word order cues for sentence interpretation.

I also define myself as a “bicultural” bilingual. Although I was born and raised in an Arakanese speaking region till 15 years of age, my family moved to and have lived in a Myanmar speaking community till now - when I am nearly 30 years old - more specifically, until my departure to Australia in 2015. Hence, I regard myself as a person who knows and practices both Arakanese and Myanmar cultures where appropriate. In fact, I use Arakanese with my family at home while I have to use most Myanmar at work and for other matters. Thus I am as fluent a speaker and listener as an Arakanese man who has always lived in a purely Arakanese speaking community. In other words, I still have my Arakanese identity despite my being away from my native town for a decade and a half. In this respect, it is worth quoting Boucher and O’Dowd (2011, p. 215) one of whose research findings is that, without use of one’s mother tongue, there may be loss of accompanying components of culture such as values and the self. I absolutely agree with them since I have met with some Arakanese people who no longer use their mother tongue and has lost their identity. Such an incidence is common among those who moved to a Myanmar majority community and got married to a Myanmar person. I feel fortunate and proud to be able to keep my identity till now!

One good thing about being a bilingual seems to be that it contributes to one’s intellectual growth and cultural knowledge. Mastery of foreign languages is found to improve creativity or four divergent thinking skills including fluency, elaboration, originality and flexibility (Ghonsooly & Showqi, 2012, p. 164). Further, they also find that learning a foreign language makes learners both cognitively practiced and culturally intimate. Hence, although I am an “ascendant” bilingual in the light of the fact that my English is developing, I have also learnt the accompanying culture and values as well as had cognitive practices for developing divergent thinking ability.

As a person who moved from a dialect-speaking region to a dominant language speaking city in my teens as mentioned earlier, I also define myself as a “circumstantial” bilingual. In his study of Italian-English circumstantial bilinguals in Australia, Santello (2014) concluded that language dominance is also a valid construct in studying bilingualism. I agree with his conclusion because I have observed that although those who moved from a community dominant in Arakanese dialect to a community dominant in Myanmar can keep identity, most of those Arakanese people who were born and raised in a community dominant in Myanmar become somewhat like Myanmar people. However, it also depends on the way the parents bring up their children dominant in Myanmar. If they encourage them to speak only Arakanese at home and when communicating with other Arakanese people, they will not lose their identity.

In conclusion, I am a “productive - receptive - dominant - sequential - ascendant - bicultural - circumstantial” bilingual because of the above-mentioned facts.

References

Baker, C. (2011). Foundations of bilingual education and bilingualism, 5^th edition [Chapter 1: Bilingualism: Definitions and distinctions. pp.1-14]. Bristol, UK: Short Run Press.

Boucher, H. C., & O'Dowd, M. C. (2011). Language and the bicultural dialectical self. Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology, 17(2), 211-216. doi:10.1037/a0023686

Dewaele, J. M., & Wei, L. (2014). Attitudes towards code-switching among adult mono- and mulitilingual language users. Journal of Mulitlingual and Multicultural Development, 35(3), 235-251. doi:10.1080/01434632.2013.859687

Ghonsooly, B., & Showqi, S. (2012). The effects of foreign language learning on creativity. English Language Teaching, 5(4), 161-167. doi:10.5539/elt.v5n4p161

Pham, G., & Ebert, K. D. (2016). A longitudinal analysis of sentence interpretation in bilingual children. Applied Psycholinguistics, 37(2), 461-485. doi:10.1017/S0142716415000077

Santello, M. (2014). Exploring the bilingualism of a migrant community through language dominance. Australian Review of Applied Linguistics, 37(1), 24-42. Retrieved from http://www.nla.gov.au/openpublish/index.php/aral/article/viewFile/3415/4017

Toh, G. (2014). English for content instruction in a Japanese higher education setting: Examining challenges, contradictions and anomalies. Language and Education, 28(4), 299-318. doi:10.1080/09500782.2013.857348

Wei, L. (2011). Moment analysis and translanguaging space: Discursive construction of identities by multilingual Chinese youth in Britain. Journal of Pragmatics, 43, 1222-1235. doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2010.07.035

(ဒီႏွစ္ဝက္မွာ သင္ယူျဖစ္ခဲ့တဲ့ Bilingual Education and Bilingualism ဘာသာရပ္အတြက္ တင္ခဲ့ရတဲ့ အဆိုုင္းမင့္ေတြထဲက ကိုုယ္တုုိင္အားရမိတဲ့ အက္ေဆးတိုုတစ္ပုုဒ္ကိုု ျပန္တင္ပါတယ္။)