THEORIES OF MULTILINGUALISM

Linguistic Theory in Multilingualism

This topic discusses a common reality in many cases of multilingualism: heritage

speakers, or unbalanced bilinguals, simultaneous or sequential, who shifted early in
childhood from one language (their heritage language) to their dominant language (the
language of their speech community). To demonstrate the relevance of heritage linguistics to
the study of linguistic competence more broadly defined, we present a series of case studies
on heritage linguistics, documenting some of the deficits and abilities typical of heritage
speakers.

Since its inception, the generative tradition within linguistic theory has concerned itself
primarily with monolingual speakers in its quest for what we know when we know (a)
language. The object of study, linguistic competence, or grammar, instantiates in and
emerges from the brains of human speakers. Grammar cannot get loaded onto a
microscope slide or set upon a scale; it gets accessed through its effects on naturally-
developing speakers who employ the grammar in their native language du jour. Grammar
informs and determines linguistic behavior; linguists study grammar by studying the behavior
of speakers and making generalizations about the idealized state of mind of these speakers.

The investigation of grammar is necessarily a circuitous enterprise: we observe

linguistic competence through linguistic performance, the situation-specific deployment of
grammar. But extra-linguistic factors influence performance, so linguists help themselves to
various domain restrictions in an attempt to limit noise in the translation from competence to
performance. Chomsky (1965, p. 4) provides an early description of the obstacle to be
overcome: “The problem for the linguist, as well as for the child learning the language, is to
determine from the data of performance the underlying system of rules that has been
mastered by the speaker-hearer and that he puts to use in actual performance.” Chomsky
also provides an early characterization of one strategy for meeting this obstacle, focusing the
linguist's attention on idealized, untainted language users.

What is Linguistic Theory?

Linguistic theory is concerned primarily with an ideal speaker-listener, in a completely

homogeneous speech-community, who knows its language perfectly and is unaffected by
such grammatically irrelevant conditions as memory limitations, distractions, shifts of
attention and interest, and errors (random or characteristic) in applying his knowledge of the
language in actual performance. (Chomsky, 1965, p. 3)

The rapid ascension of formal linguistics over the intervening five decades has
demonstrated the success of this focused approach to the study of language (for a similar
line of discussion, see Lohndal, 2013). A great deal of progress has been made to move
beyond “grammars” in the traditional sense—comprehensive descriptions of language-
specific regularities and their exceptions—to grammar in the Chomskyan sense: the rules
and processes that generate those regularities in the first place.

Still, Chomsky's counsel necessarily excludes from study a wide swath of the world's
language users, communities, and even languages. Put simply, the majority of speakers and
speaking contexts fail to meet the admittedly idealized criteria above. But even ignoring the
“grammatically irrelevant conditions” that govern the use of language, what do we make of
the multitudes of speakers who may claim imperfect competence in more than one
language? So far in the history of generative linguistics, the answer to this question has
been “not much.” Citing the wealth of data that gets ignored in such an unrealistic exclusion,
together with the unique questions these data stand to answer, Benmamoun et al. (2013b, p.
129) propose we augment our study of language by “shifting linguistic attention from the
model of a monolingual speaker to the model of a multilingual speaker.” Similarly, Rothman
and Treffers-Daller (2014) contend that multilingual speakers should be considered native in
more than one language and call for a revision of the overall concept of a well-rounded
native speaker. We follow these authors in focusing our attention on a subset of multilingual
language users: heritage speakers.

Before turning to the case studies, the remainder of this introduction describes the
population of interest as it is typically characterized, together with various proposals meant
to account for the unique linguistic competence of heritage speakers.

Introducing Heritage Speakers

To illustrate the defining characteristics of a heritage speaker, we begin with a few

hypothetical examples. For starters, meet Samantha. Her family is from Korea, but she was
born in Los Angeles and has never travelled to Korea. While in Los Angeles, Samantha grew
up immersed in the rich Korean culture that is prevalent there (Los Angeles has the largest
Korean-American population in the USA). Samantha went to a Korean Sunday school when
she was a child, and she still uses Korean with her family and at church. However, she is
more comfortable speaking in English; and although she reads Korean, she prefers reading
in English. Samantha is always rather nervous about her Korean not being good enough for
her family.

Margot is only a hundred or so miles south of Samantha, living in a secluded area in La

Jolla, California (outside of San Diego). Her family moved there from Russia when she was
three, and her younger siblings were all born in La Jolla. Her father still has some business
in Russia, but Margot and her siblings rarely go there. They prefer traveling to Western
Europe, where everybody speaks English and they have an easier time communicating.
When Margot and her siblings meet other Russians, they are always a bit suspicious of them
and do not socialize too much.

Robert was born in Frankfurt, but when he was just a few months old, his family moved
to Abu Dhabi, where his father worked as a banker. He had an Arabic-speaking nanny and
went to an international school, but socialized with Arabic-speaking children (they all shared
a passion in soccer). Robert moved back to Germany when he was 15, got his education in
Germany, and is currently living in Berlin where he works as a graphic designer. He is still in
touch with his friends in Abu Dhabi—they connect over social media—and it is his hope to
save enough money to travel back to the place where he spent his childhood.

Shawn was born in Canada. His mother is Japanese and his father is British, fluent in
Japanese. The family moved to Japan when Shawn was a toddler. He has received all of his
education in Japanese, and although he has had a fair amount of English instruction and
speaks English with his father now, as a young adult, he is more comfortable in Japanese.
Recently, he took a course in American literature in his college; whenever possible, he tried
to read the assigned books in a Japanese translation, which he found much easier than the
original English.

What do these people have in common? They were all exposed to a certain language in
their childhood, but then switched to another language, the dominant language of their
society, later in their childhood. These are unbalanced bilinguals, sequential (Doris and
Margot) or simultaneous (Robert, Shawn, Samantha), whose home language is much less
present in their linguistic repertoire than the dominant language of their society. They may
have gotten there in different ways, but they are all heritage speakers.

Narrowly defined, heritage speakers are individuals who were raised in homes where a
language other than the dominant community language was spoken, resulting in some
degree of bilingualism in the heritage language and the dominant language (Valdés, 2000).
A heritage speaker may also be the child of an immigrant family who abruptly shifted from
her first language to the dominant language of her new community. Crucially, the heritage
speaker began learning the heritage language before, or concurrently with, the language
which would become the stronger language. That bilingualism may be imbalanced, even
heavily imbalanced, in favor of the dominant language, but some abilities in the heritage
language persist.

Heritage speakers present a unique testbed for issues of acquisition, maintenance, and
transfer within linguistic theory. In contrast to the traditional acquisition trajectory of idealized
monolinguals, heritage speakers do not seem to exhibit native-like mastery of their first
language in adulthood. As the definition of the heritage speaker makes clear, this apparent
near-native acquisition owes to a shift of the learner's attention during childhood to a
different dominant/majority language. However, the specifics of this attainment trajectory are
anything but clear.

Dominant Language Transfer

An important point of contact between heritage speakers and second language

learners lacking from traditional L1 acquisition is the interplay between the learner's first
(heritage) language and second (dominant) language. Language transfer, or the nature of
that particular interplay, is a foundational issue in second language acquisition research: to
what extent does the first language grammar play a role in shaping the developing second
language grammar? The effects of the native language on the acquisition of a second
language in different levels of linguistic analysis (e.g., phonology, morphology, syntax,
semantics, or the lexicon) have been extensively documented in the second language
acquisition literature (e.g., Odlin, 1989; White, 1989; Gass and Selinker, 1992; Schwartz and
Sprouse, 1996; Jarvis, 1998).

Affordances Theory in Multilingualism

The theory of affordances can actually provide a valuable, supplementary, up-to-date

frame work within which a clearer, sharper description and explication of the intriguing range
of attributes of multilingual communities, educational institutions and individuals, as well as
teaching practices, become feasible. The concept of affordances originating in Gibson’s
work (Gibson, 1977), is gaining momentum in multilingualism studies.

Who is the proponent of this theory?

 James J. Gibson, in full James Jerome Gibson, (born January 27, 1904, Ohio, U.S.—
died December 11, 1979, Ithaca, New York), American psychologist whose theories of visual
perception were influential among some schools of psychology and philosophy in the late
20th century. James Jerome Gibson, is one of the most important contributors to the field of
visual perception. Gibson challenged the idea that the nervous system actively constructs
conscious visual perception, and instead promoted ecological psychology, in which the mind
directly perceives environmental stimuli without additional cognitive construction or
processing. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked him as the
88th most cited psychologist of the 20th century, tied with John Garcia, David Rumelhart,
Louis Leon Thurstone, Margaret Floy Washburn, and Robert S. Woodworth.

Gibson created a highly influential theory of “affordances”.

Gibson coined the noun affordance. For Gibson the noun affordance
pertains to the environment providing the opportunity for action.
Affordances require a relationship in which the environment and the
animal can work together. An example is that mankind has changed
the environment to better suit our needs. When coming across
Earth's natural steep slopes, man designed stairs in order to afford
walking. In addition, objects in the environment can also afford many different behaviors,
such as lifting or grasping. Gibson argued that when we perceive an object, we observe the
object's affordances and not its particular qualities. He believed that perceiving affordances
of an object is easier than perceiving the many different qualities an object may have.
Affordances can be related to different areas of the habitat as well. Some areas of the world
allow for concealing while some allow for foraging.

Definition of Affordances

Gibson notes that while the verb to afford is in the dictionary, the noun affordance is
not. He had made it up. It is worth remembering that Gibson developed his affordance
concept not with reference to the social or human sciences, but in its application to physics,
optics, anatomy and the physiology of eye and brain. His creation of the affordances notion
came out of his interest in vision and perception, first with regard to animals in the natural
environment and then, by extension, to human beings. The widely cited definition of
affordances by Gibson (1979/1986) runs as follows: “The affordances of the environment is
what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill”
 What is Affordances Theory in Multilingualism

There is a need to further clarify the term affordances, its theoretical underpinning
and its advantages over other terms. Affordances is an expression commonly deployed in
contemporary sociolinguistic work, yet its meaning is rarely specified to the extent of
furnishing an explanation of what exactly is provided by the term affordances which goes
beyond the denotation of existing terms. What is routinely called “the theory of affordances”
is not a fully-fledged theory, but rather a conceptual understanding shared across many
fields.

“This is not the world of physics, but the world at the level of ecology”, explains
Gibson (1979/1986, p. 2). Remarkably, the ecological approach renders Gibson’s vision
closer to the field of society and language and language teaching and learning. Gibson
emphasized the importance of environment and context in learning. Perception is important
because it allows humans to adapt to their environment. The affordances of language in
society – be it in the area of instruction and didactics or in the more general field of
education and social context, draw from the original Gibson’s literally ecological views but
translate into something somewhat different in form, type, scale and manifestation, as they
refer to the social dimension in greater measure than they refer to purely physical dimension.

Different physical dispositions and characteristics afford different behaviors for

different animals, including the human species, and different kinds of encounters. The same
objects or events can present different affordances for different actors; thus, for instance,
grass presents different ranges of affordances for birds, animals and for people. In the same
way, a book in a foreign language presents different affordances for learners and users with
differing levels of mastery of this language.

Gibson’s Key Points in Affordances Theory

In search of further insights, let us address some of Gibson’s original insights which
we feel are especially important in the context of a discussion of multilingualism and
additional language learning. These elements recur as leitmotifs through his books, but have
not, to our knowledge, been given the attention they warrant. The relevant key elements we
are thinking of are:

 Affordances being furnished according to the size of an animal;

 The mutuality of animal and environment;
  Nesting;
 Information about the self-accompanying information about the environment, the two
being inseparable.

 Information about the self-accompanying information about the environment,

the two being inseparable.

We will begin with the last of these, to which we wish to give special emphasis,
because it has not yet been, as far as we know, directly connected to the teaching, learning
and use of multiple languages although it has a considerable bearing on it. This point,
information about the self, to our mind, corresponds with and complements awareness
phenomena, also a recently developing topic. Here is what Gibson says about this issue:
“Information about the self, accompanies information about the environment, and the two are
inseparable. Perception has two poles, the subjective and the objective, and information is
available to specify both. One perceives the environment and coperceives oneself”.

The concept of linguistic and metalinguistic awareness (see, e.g., Jessner, 2006)
also has to do with information about the self. It turns the attention of the language
apprentice towards the language(s) she/he is concerned with and towards him/herself as a
language learner and language user. When the two are coupled and placed in the context of
affordances, information about the self receives more shades and aspects and is seen to
manifest an active, dynamic role in the language learning enterprise. In the same way as
animals need to be aware of their location, as well as the disposition of objects and other
animals, for successful hunting, eating, or hiding, so language users and language learners
need to be aware of their needs, of where they stand with regard to other languages and
other speakers, of their progress as language acquirers, and of the prospects for further
language acquisition and for language use.

To see “where we are” at each particular moment is a biological necessity for survival
(in the widest sense of this word). In sociolinguistic terms, the global locomotion of speakers
and languages – mobility – is always opening up new horizons for language users and giving
them an awareness of the possibilities and the importance of deploying other languages.
Looking around and getting around are important not only in relation to visual perception but
also, in humans, in relation to language use. To apperceive which language(s) and to which
extent is/are needful for a person or a group in particular circumstances is of universal
practical importance. This is what we must weigh in our everyday and long-term language-
related decisions, as individuals and as communities. It is what educational authorities and
political groups must constantly come back to in the language domain – evaluating the
affordances and contemplating which affordances require to be added or removed. With
respect to second language learning this points to the importance of a variety of
indispensable kinds of self-monitoring. The implication of Gibson’s idea is that second
language teachers need to supply the affordances for such self-observation – for learners to
be able, for instance, to situate the skills they have gained in a given language at particular
times and in particular places in their relation to their skills in other languages, and to be able
to reflect on their learning aims.

 Affordances being furnished according to the size of an animal

In the context of acquiring and using language this postulate implies that affordances are
always connected with the features of the learner and user as well as with the features of a
language learnt and used. It also translates into the specificity of affordances for each actor;
that is, what an affordance is for one person or group of learner-users does not correspond
to what it is for another individual or group. It is clear, for example, that affordances for
speakers of a heritage language would be different from affordances for speakers of a
national or official language in the same setting.

Alternatively, an affordance may be perceived by some learner-users as an affordance

which is not worth making anything of. Thus, it happens regularly in the immigration context
that some immigrants, often the older ones, feel they will not be able to learn a new
language, and so rely on continuing to communicate in their own language by living in their
“bubble” – the family or community where the language of origin is regularly used. The
affordances, that is, native speakers, books, culture, second language exposure, situations
in which the use of the second language was appropriate were many, but were not utilized
by thousands of people. Within the framework of second language teaching this notion that
“affordances are furnished according to the size of an animal” tells us that it is sensible to
individualize approaches to designing courseware, and methods and techniques of
teaching/learning strategies.
  The mutuality of animal and environment

With regard to the mutuality of animal and environment, according to Gibson

(1979/1986), this signifies that the observer and the environment are complementary. For
human beings the links to the environment, that is, social milieu, are not limited to the
physical dimension, as in the case of animals. The emotional, moral, evaluative and
intentional and cognitive vectors are no less real for people than the material composition of
their environment. All of these, separately and together, offer a variety of affordances of
different kinds and scope. With regard to the field of multilingualism and additional language
acquisition we would define Gibson’s point in terms of dynamic mutuality of identity and
milieu. The dynamic mutuality of identity and milieu is both a process and a result as each
specific moment and each particular sociolinguistic situation provides a specific set of
affordances. It is for educators, teachers and learners to make use of all the relevant
affordances, or some part of them, or none of them.

 Nesting

The fourth key element is nesting, as termed by Gibson (1979/1986). According to him,
nesting refers to the fact that “smaller units are embedded in the larger units”, as canyons
are nested within mountains, trees are nested within canyons and leaves are nested within
trees. Nesting corresponds to (but is not the same as) the notion of niche in globalization
studies and scaling properties in the complexity approach. An example of an affordance
“nested” in a small area is the affordance for the unique whistle language used by the local
inhabitants in the sierra of Oaxaca, Mexico – the Mazatecs. Specific geographical
conditions, namely the rugged highland areas virtually without level ground, the hilly,
mountainous terrain, and the profusion of valleys, can be seen as the particular set of
affordances which lead to Mazatecs’ unique way of communicating over long distances (over
2 km) without the use of phones. Another example of a very small-scale phenomenon is the
case of Boa Sr of the Andaman Islands, who had lived through the 2004 tsunami, the
Japanese occupation and the diseases originally brought by British settlers; this person was
the last native of the island chain who was fluent in Bo. Her recent death effectively annuls
the affordance for this language. More generally, in language learning it typically is the case
that smaller units (e.g., a family) have a different range of affordances than larger units (e.g.,
a school).
EXERCISE

INSTRUCTIONS: Encircle the letter of the correct answer.

1. He coined the noun affordance. For him, the noun affordance pertains to the
environment providing the opportunity for action.
a) James Jedrin Gibson
b) James Jerome Gibson
c) James Jerald Gibson
d) James Joseph Gibson

2. One of the Gibson’s key points in affordances theory which signifies that the observer
and the environment are complementary.
a) Affordances being furnished according to the size of an animal
b) The mutuality of animal and environment
c) Nesting
d) Information about the self-accompanying information about the environment, the two
being inseparable

3. One of the Gibson’s key points in affordances theory which refers to the fact that
“smaller units are embedded in the larger units”.
a) Affordances being furnished according to the size of an animal
b) The mutuality of animal and environment
c) Nesting
d) Information about the self-accompanying the two being inseparable
4. It is concerned primarily with an ideal speaker-listener, in a completely
homogeneous speech-community, who knows its language perfectly and is
unaffected by such grammatically irrelevant conditions.
a) Linguistic Theory
b) Affordances Theory
c) Nesting
d) Bilingualism

5. Heritage speakers are individuals who were raised in homes where a language other
than the dominant community language was spoken, resulting in some degree of
bilingualism in the heritage language and the dominant language.
 a) True
b) False

SUMMARY

 Different physical dispositions and characteristics afford different behaviors for

different animals, including the human species, and different kinds of encounters.
The same objects or events can present different affordances for different actors
 There is a need to further clarify the term affordances, its theoretical underpinning
and its advantages over other terms. Affordances is an expression commonly
deployed in contemporary sociolinguistic work, yet its meaning is rarely specified to
the extent of furnishing an explanation of what exactly is provided by the term
affordances which goes beyond the denotation of existing terms.
 A set of affordances would include a variety of types: actions and material objects,
emotions and feelings, and social affordances relative to a given community or
country.
 In second language learning, for performing an action or realizing a goal – such as
memorizing ten words, understanding an L2 text, or, more ambitiously, mastering the
basic structure of a language – one separate affordance is not enough. Rather, sets
or packages of affordances are required to be furnished in order that the action may
be performed or the goal achieved.
 The study of multilingualism has long been the intellectual property of linguistics
subfields like sociolinguistics and language acquisition, and with good reason: we
must understand the complexities of the multilingual experience before we can
analyze its exponence in language users. With this limitation in mind, we began by
considering the heterogeneity in just one sub-population of multilinguals, namely
heritage speakers. With a clearer picture of the factors at play shaping the heritage
grammar, we then presented case studies appropriating heritage language study into
core domains of linguistic theory.
 We chose these case studies to highlight the breadth of heritage language research
and its implications for linguistic theory, but we also chose them to evidence some
useful methods in its practice. A few practical themes repeated themselves:
establishment of a clear native baseline (a must for any comparison); determination
of the input to heritage language acquisition by documenting the language of the
parents (to locate the potential source of reanalysis and differences from the
language in the homeland); determination of child heritage language behavior (to test
 for attrition over the lifespan); comparison of dominant and heritage language ability
in the same population (to test for transfer, and its directionality). These practices
help to narrow the possible explanations for observed atypical language behavior,
pointing to both the trajectory and the outcome of grammatical phenomena in
heritage speakers.

REFERENCES:

Aronin, L., & Singleton, D. (2012). Affordances theory in multilingualism studies. Studies in
Second Language Learning and Teaching, 2(3), 311.
https://doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2012.2.3.3

Scontras, G., Fuchs, Z., Polinsky M. (October, 2015). Heritage language and linguistic
theory. Frontiers. Retrieved from
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01545/full