Reframing Teachers’ Language

Knowledge Through Metaphor

Analysis of Language Portraits
SIMON COFFEY
King’s College London
Department of Education and Professional Studies Franklin–Wilkins Building
Waterloo Road
London SE1 9NH
United Kingdom
Email: simon.coffey@kcl.ac.uk

As theoretical developments in applied linguistics challenge the dominant mentalist framing of cogni-
tion as knowledge residing in the head, new ways of understanding and recording teachers’ and students’
engagement with languages are needed. Structural and competence-based formats for measuring pro-
ficiency posit an incremental model of learning as sequential mastery of language features acquired in
a predictable order, but this is only one story of how languages are learnt. An alternative and emerging
paradigm seeks to understand how different languages are experienced and appropriated subjectively
in individual lives. In this article, I point to recent scholarship in language teacher education to show
how critical language awareness entails reflecting not only on language content but also on perceptions
of language(s) and language learning. I analyse a set of language portraits, produced in a workshop with
teacher candidates, to demonstrate that language autobiographies, when used within a phenomenolog-
ical perspective, elicit a broader reflexivity vis-à-vis teachers’ own language learning history (plurilingual
repertoire) through recourse to different metaphors that are both embodied and emotional. This re-
framing extends the research agenda into language teacher cognition by bringing into teacher educa-
tion different modes of reflexivity to encourage a more nuanced picture of how individuals relate to and
personally invest in languages.
Keywords: embodied cognition; language portraits; metaphor; plurilingual repertoire; teacher knowledge

TEACHER EDUCATORS IN THE UNITED
States have been engaged in a lively debate
around domains of knowledge in second lan-
guage teaching, including in second language
teacher education (Burke, 2013; Glisan, Swender,
& Surface, 2013). This debate, bringing into focus
fundamental beliefs about how language is de-
fined in instructional contexts, has implications
for how teacher knowledge is construed in all na-
tional contexts. On one hand, however “protean”
(Larsen–Freeman & Freeman, 2008, p. 32) the
concept of language may be, modern languages
as a taught discipline clearly requires a delineated
The Modern Language Journal, 99, 3, (2015)
DOI: 10.1111/modl.12235
0026-7902/15/500–514 $1.50/0

C 2015 The Modern Language Journal
knowledge base upon which to plan curricula:
the identifiable “subject matter knowledge”
(Richards, 1998, p. 8), defined as “what teachers
need to know about what they teach” (p. 9). On
the other hand, parameters have been redrawn
as wider epistemological developments from
ethnographically oriented applied linguistics
have undermined the conception of a language
(English, Spanish, and so forth) as a unified en-
tity. This challenge to the definitional parameters
of a language has led to the claim that the notion
of “a ‘real language’ is a normative fiction” (Klein,
1998, p. 541) that, while it “may be important as a
social construct, (...) is not suited as an analytical
lens through which to view language practices”
(Blackledge, Creese, & Kaur Takhi, 2013, p. 59).
The need to extend conceptions of teacher lan-
guage knowledge in mainstream (K–12) teacher
Simon Coffey
education, alongside the traditional proficiency
measures of formal qualifications and knowledge
audits, has been slow to gather momentum de-
spite the broader conceptualisation of language
in the literature (Byrnes, 2009). One of the limi-
tations cited in the call to extend the scope of the
ACTFL (American Council on Teaching Foreign
Languages) assessment framework, for example,
is the examination of attitudes and perceptions
(Phipps & Levine, 2010) in order to “understand
better what learners think about language learn-
ing” (Magnan, Murphy, & Sahakyan, 2014, p. 28).
As stated by these authors, “the notion of the
agency of an individual within multiple commu-
nities points toward what might well be the most
serious, unattended to issue in the Standards”
(p. 34). This observation applies both to language
assessment in schools and to measures of teacher
knowledge in teacher education programmes.
Teacher agency (Feryok, 2012) requires a reflexiv-
ity of one’s own experience, not just in immediate
practice but across biographical time as use of dif-
ferent languages, now more than ever, intersects
many professional and societal communities.
The central claim of this article is that framing
subject matter knowledge against normative stan-
dards alone is limited in two important ways: First,
such a framing constructs learning as purely se-
quential and accumulative; second, it constructs
language as a unified abstract system (a “structure-
based mental system” [Larsen–Freeman & Free-
man, 2008, p. 149]). Both of these framing
constructions, which can be understood within
the modernist technorationalist (Freeman, 2004)
account of language that has dominated language
teacher education, do not take account of the
following two observations: (a) learning is also
an embodied and emotional experience charac-
terised by fluctuation (including lapse, attrition,
and reactivation; Llewellyn–Williams, 2014), and
(b) engagement with different language(s) is
idiosyncratic, so that personal experience of
the system called, for instance, French is highly
subjective.
I report on a study in which I elicited a set of
language portraits drawn by teacher candidates
to represent their knowledge of and affective
relationship to the languages in their plurilin-
gual repertoire (developed later). I analysed the
metaphors drawn on to encourage a nonlinear
exploration of knowledge and proficiency and to
show that autobiographical reflexivity frames lan-
guage learning as inseparable from the emotions
and from embodied experience.
501
LANGUAGE TEACHER EDUCATION IN
ENGLAND
The traditional and still prevalent route to gain
licensure (called in Britain qualified teacher status)
for secondary school teaching is to take a special-
ist degree (BA/BSc) and then to do a one-year
teacher training programme based in a university
education department. Candidates spend around
two-thirds of the training year in schools doing
teaching practice and the remainder in university
attending seminars that focus on different theo-
retical and practical aspects of teaching method-
ology, learning theory, and issues of teacher pro-
fessionalism. The teacher education programme
in the university I work at, in common with other
homologous programmes, features a strand
of subject knowledge language development.
Candidates in this programme are required to
offer two modern languages (of French, German,
and Spanish). Some trainees identify as a native
speaker in one language; other trainees are of
mixed language heritage and identify as a native
speaker in more than one language. The require-
ment to offer multiple languages reflects the
growing need for language teachers in England
and in some other English-speaking countries to
adapt to changing language popularities, often
reorienting their specialism to include a second,
third, or even fourth foreign language. The vast
majority of candidates are modern languages
graduates, and all have a personal history of high
level language study and some international mo-
bility, either having lived abroad in childhood, on
study trips, during a year abroad, or while teach-
ing English as foreign language, and so forth.
In England,¹ there is no agreed accreditation
benchmark like the ACTFL/NCATE (National
Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education)
standards. Teacher educators therefore decide on
their own point-of-entry proficiency criteria for
accepting candidates into programmes. Similarly,
once in the programme, it is incumbent upon
university education departments in England to
devise their own formats for the maintenance and
ongoing development of language subject knowl-
edge. That said, teacher educators in England,
like colleagues in the United States, are subject
to increasingly stringent “accountability regimes”
(Norris, 2013, p. 554). In the United Kingdom, it
is common practice to use a self-assessment model
called a subject knowledge audit, whereby teacher
candidates log their language development ac-
tivities in a highly structured, linear form (under
each of six headings is a list of competences and
then a list of proficiency statements which the
502
trainees sign, date, and revisit throughout the
year). Some dissenting voices have railed against
the audit, perceiving it as a top-down accountabil-
ity mechanism that creates an artificial and dis-
embodied construction of subject knowledge. For
example, V. Ellis (2009) concludes that “the audit
has a powerfully negative symbolic effect that be-
ginning teachers do well to counter” (p. 166). In
sympathy with this position, one of the ways I seek
to counter the constraints of the language audit is
by encouraging a broader conception of the lan-
guage learner as a social actor having a complex
relationship with the language(s) that they know.
LANGUAGE KNOWLEDGE AS
PLURILINGUAL REPERTOIRE
The model of language served by common
proficiency benchmarks needs to be balanced by
more nuanced conceptions of language so that
teachers do not confuse, for instance, the concep-
tion of language with language for subject matter; for
example, how French is constructed as a language
and how knowledge of French is constructed for
instructional purposes. As Trappes–Lomax and
Ferguson (2002) point out, English or French as
disciplines are not English or French as things in
themselves but English or French “as a foreign
language. Knowing the subject involves recog-
nising this foreignness” (p. 25), including what
that means to different groups of learners. From
this perspective, it follows that learning foreign
languages in both formal and informal settings is
closely tied to autobiographical experience and
personal beliefs about language(s). As Tedick
(2009) states, “Pre-service teachers enter teacher
education programmes with pre-conceived ideas”
(p. 264), often based on their own educational
experiences (Lortie, 1975; Pajares, 1992), and
the goal of teacher educators is to lead them to
apprehend and question these ideas, including
what foreign languages represent. In short, in
order to extend conceptions of language beyond
exclusively mental models, there is a need to find
ways to articulate teachers’ subjective experience
of languages.
To unpack what it means to know (a) lan-
guage(s), I use the term repertoire, a concept
that has been increasingly used by researchers,
especially in Europe, to denote an individual’s
ensemble of language competences that are
situated, variable, and therefore always partial,
described by Blommaert (2010) as “truncated”
(p. 8). The Council of Europe has framed
knowledge of language(s) as repertoire in its
description of plurilingualism, a concept which
The Modern Language Journal 99 (2015)
“contrasts in important ways with the concept of
multilingualism” (Larsen–Freeman & Freeman,
2008, p. 160), whereby “a plurilingual person has:
- A repertoire of languages and language varieties
- Competences of different kinds and levels within
the repertoire.” (Council of Europe, 2006, p. 5)
In her review of how the notion of repertoire
has been conceptually expanded since Gumperz’s
(1971) early formulation of verbal repertoire, Busch
(2012) describes a linguistic repertoire as “a hypo-
thetical structure, which evolves by experiencing
language in interaction on a cognitive and on
an emotional level and is inscribed into corporal
memory” (p. 521). It is this focus on the emo-
tional and embodied as well as cognitive aspects
of language learning that I emphasise in my
appropriation of the plurilingual repertoire.
Formulating knowledge as a plurilingual
repertoire fits conceptually within the recent
autobiographical turn in applied linguistics
(Coffey, 2013; Coffey & Street, 2008; Kinginger,
2004; Kramsch, 2009; Pavlenko, 2007; Tse, 2000)
and resonates with the growing field of narrative
inquiry now well established in teacher develop-
ment (cf. Golombek, 2015). Following Johnson
and Golombek’s (2011) call to document how
“teachers’ narrative activities are being taken
up and used within second language teacher
education programmes” (p. 504), the study pre-
sented here intends to extend that line of teacher
education by including “products of narrative
activity” (p. 488) that are both autobiographical
and framed within a phenomenological account
of experience. Although the language portraits
and the accompanying descriptions are not nar-
rative in the sense of temporally ordered events
reconstructed in discourse, they share with the
narrative work in teacher development (e.g.,
Barkhuizen, 2011; Barkhuizen, Benson, & Chik,
2014; Beattie, 1995; Clandinin & Connelly, 2000;
K. E. Johnson, 2009; Johnson & Golombek, 2011)
the epistemological frame of reflexivity, where
this signals processes that “can help us move
researchers and teachers away from dogmatic,
essentialised truths about themselves and others”
(Byrd–Clark & Dervin, 2014, p. 3). Reflecting on
subjective experience through the articulation of
one’s plurilingual repertoire is an essential move
to bring language teacher education in tune with
the wider turn to language learning as an em-
bodied (Atkinson, 2010; Kramsch, 2009) situated
investment that is not explicable in terms of in-
strumental transaction or (even) cognitive train-
ing. The multimodal dimension of metaphorising
through drawing plays “an instrumental part in
Simon Coffey
reflexivity because it permits us to make visible
the multidimensionality of meanings, interpre-
tations, strategies, positionings, representations
(experiences), and voices that we encounter and
engage in research and teaching” (Byrd–Clark &
Dervin, 2014, p. 3).
METAPHORS AND EMBODIED COGNITION
Since Lakoff and Johnson (1980) demon-
strated that metaphors are not simply literary
devices but are conceptualising mechanisms
through which we structure mundane experi-
ence, there has been a substantial field of cog-
nitive linguistics scholarship investigating how
metaphors both are shaped by and, in turn, con-
stitute sensory experience. Universal perceptual
systems, called “image schemata” (M. Johnson,
1987, p. xiv), include basic orientation patterns
such as up–down, centre–periphery, contain-
ment, part–whole, and balance; “these patterns
emerge as meaningful structures for us chiefly at
the level of our bodily movement through space,
our manipulation of objects, and our perceptual
interactions” (p. 29). The patterns are translated
into conceptual categories as they are mapped across
domains from source to target through metaphor-
ical analogy. Classic conceptual categories such as
LIFE IS A JOURNEY thereby give rise to descrip-
tive devices that metaphorise the lifespan into
movement (going along the road of life, etc.) so
that time and space are conflated in metaphor.
Fundamental to Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980)
thesis of the embodied mind is that mental concep-
tualisation can only ever result from embodied
engagements, and these can only be articulated
in language through conceptual metaphorical
categories. Echoing the French phenomenologist
Merleau–Ponty (1960, 1962), they do not refer to
the body in a mechanistic way, but rather “the term
embodiment is meant to indicate the developing
process of organism–environment interactions
that constitutes our ever-changing reality” (M.
Johnson, 1989, p. 367). The approach presented
in this article is therefore inscribed in a phe-
nomenological epistemology in seeking to chal-
lenge the separation between object (here, the
language as a system) and subject (the individual
experience of that object) by paying close atten-
tion to individual experience, which is primor-
dially sensory and embodied, “the locus of mean-
ing and knowledge” (M. Johnson, 1989, p. 368).
In refuting Cartesian dualism, Lakoff and
Johnson (1999) openly challenged the Western
philosophical tradition of separating mind and
body, stating that Cartesian conclusions such as
503
“the mind is disembodied” have affected “a good
deal of Anglo–American philosophy of mind” and
“have also made their way into other academic
disciplines, into our educational systems and into
popular culture as well” (pp. 400–401; see also
Crookes, 2015). To draw an analogy from linguis-
tics, the description of synchronic and diachronic
linguistics (posited by Saussure as, respectively,
langue or language as an abstract system and
parole or language as an appropriated, subjective
practice) reflects not two separate orders of lan-
guage but, as Merleau–Ponty (1960) recognised,
continual interaction between the objective and
the subjective (i.e., “the diachronic envelops the
synchronic (...) [and] the synchronic envelops
the diachronic” [my translation], p. 108). Pro-
ficiency measures (by test or by audit) posit a
metaphorised model of language as an abstract
system (the synchronic) but do not lead to un-
derstanding how this system is acted upon. While
one recognises languages (e.g., French, German,
English, and so forth) as pre-existing entities,
it is just as necessary to emphasise how users
encounter and interact with them, that is, how
they are experienced, in autobiographical time.
Within language learning scholarship,
metaphor analysis has been used to examine
learners’ perception of (ESL) language teachers
(de Guerrero, 2002), attitudes to language (R.
Ellis, 2001), and what it means to speak and write
in a new language (Kramsch, 2009). Cortazzi and
Jin (1999) used metaphor analysis (by collecting
a list of metaphors about languages and teaching,
prompted by “language is ...” and “teaching is
...”) to point to cultural variation in metaphor
construction, with “teacher as friend” and
“teacher as parent” occurring more frequently in
“neo-Confucian traditions of relations-based ap-
proaches to social life” (p. 175). Boers (2003) has
also signalled cross-cultural variation in concep-
tual metaphor, qualifying variation as operant in
complex (i.e., not primary) metaphor and result-
ing from “shared experiential domains” (p. 233),
which, I suggest, are analogous with acculturation
into professional communities, such as the teach-
ing profession or research scholarship, where
shared nomenclatures and shared metaphors
shape the process of professional becoming. The
“variations in metaphor patterns” identified by
Kramsch (2009) characterised personal and phys-
ical encounters with language(s) that “contrasted
with the input–output information-processing
metaphors that dominate second language ac-
quisition research” (p. 58). Kramsch found that
“far from being perceived as primarily a tool for
communication and exchange of information,
504
the foreign language is first and foremost ex-
perienced physically, linguistically, emotionally,
artistically” (p. 60).
THE STUDY
This study draws on Lakoff and Johnson’s
(1980, 1999) work on the formulation of
metaphors to analyse representations of lan-
guages elicited with reference to coloured and
illustrated body drawings. The language portraits
provide rich data for potential analysis at differ-
ent levels—different “modes of understanding”
(Lakoff & Johnson, 1999, p. 106)—which contrast
with the linear, unitary, and disembodied repre-
sentation of language(s) enshrined in the subject
knowledge audit. Pioneered by Gogolin and
Neumann’s (1991) work with bilingual children
in monolingual elementary schools, the language
portrait approach has been used by many other
researchers. Especially noteworthy is the ongo-
ing work by the Spracherleben (‘Experiencing of
languages’) research group at the University of
Vienna. Krumm and Jenkins (2001) and Krumm
(2011) reported on larger scale studies using
language portraits in primary and secondary
school settings to promote language awareness by
exploring children’s conceptions of second lan-
guage German in relation to their mother tongue.
Busch (2012), who introduced the approach to
me, used language portraits (which she describes
as “multimodal,” p. 511) to investigate how draw-
ings of teachers from the German–French border
area of Saarland and Lorraine carry traces of
historical language ideologies. Busch uses the
“multimodal biographical approach” (p. 503)
to extend the notion of repertoire within post-
structuralist theory, whereby “it becomes clear
that discursively constructed categories, because
of the fact that they can always be reinvoked,
display their own dynamics” (p. 519). More re-
cently, Prasad (2014) has extended the approach,
moving from using fixed body silhouettes to
encouraging children (at a French international
school in Toronto) to create from scratch their
own multimodal forms as “more individualised
arts-informed linguistic self-portraits” (p. 58).
Here, I report on an experimental workshop
I ran with a group of candidate teachers in
September 2013 (and have since repeated and
run with in-service teachers) as one of a number
of language autobiography elicitations, originally
within the context of a (European Union) funded
project² aiming to promote new approaches to
understanding plurilingualism. The aims of the
study were twofold: to make a contribution to the
The Modern Language Journal 99 (2015)
scholarship linking metaphor analysis and lan-
guage learning and to enhance novice teachers’
professional development through extending
their conception of language knowledge and lan-
guage learning. The specific aims of my analysis
were (a) to examine how languages are organised
within embodied representations of the plurilin-
gual repertoire and (b) to encourage teachers
to reflect on their emotional and embodied rela-
tionships with different languages, moving away
from purely verbal descriptions of language(s)
towards seeing the experience of languages as a
complex configuration of emotional impressions
felt in the body.
Research Design, Methods, and Participants
After presenting the requisite institutional
subject knowledge audit and discussing different
strategies and materials to develop their own
subject knowledge, I introduced my group of 26
teacher candidates (20 women and 6 men) to the
Council of Europe’s model of plurilingualism and
how others have extended this within the frame
of what I call a plurilingual repertoire. I asked
the participants to reflect on their own language
learning history and the different ways they had
encountered and engaged with languages in their
lives. In a quiet seminar room with tables cleared,
I asked the participants to call to mind the people
and places that they associate with their different
languages, and to reflect on their emotional
responses to the languages in their repertoire. I
then asked them to imagine these emotional re-
sponses as colours. Next, I distributed blank body
shapes on A4 paper and sets of colouring pens
and crayons for teachers to draw their linguistic
repertoire. The drawing was executed in an
atmosphere of thoughtful concentration as each
person engaged with their own memories and
visual storytelling. I allowed 40 minutes for the
drawing, during which time I left the room. After
drawing, candidates were invited to write a brief
description of their language portraits. Twenty
chose to write an accompanying text. Participants
were invited to submit their drawing and text for
analysis by leaving them on the table after going
home with a completed written consent form in
accordance with the university’s research ethics
procedure. All gave consent.
Analysis
My analysis focused on both the language
portraits and the accompanying texts. As Busch
(2012) points out, as a multimodal method,
Simon Coffey
“the language portrait provides two sets of data
(permitting) inferences to be drawn concerning
how speakers interpret their linguistic repertoire:
a visual one and a narrative one. Meaning is
created through both modes; one is neither
the translation nor simply the illustration of the
other” (p. 518). I analysed the drawings and
their descriptions by listing for each portrait
and description: (a) how each language was
represented (colour, shape, shading, cultural
icon), (b) where the language was represented
(inside or outside the body), (c) what itera-
tion of metaphorical devices signalled semantic
(in the text) or semiotic (on the portraits)
prosody.
The visual mode allowed for greater perfor-
mative elasticity (“ambiguities and perspective
shifts,” Busch, 2012, p. 518) and included detail
that was not alluded to in the textual mode (e.g.,
through adornment of the body or contextual
background imagery). I interpreted the lists
within a model of conceptual categories, which
are presented in the next section. I include in
this paper only textual data extracts and provide
illustrative data from the seven texts that are
included in the Appendix, with my explanatory
notes to describe the drawn portraits inserted in
squared brackets. (Comments in data extracts
in round brackets are the teachers’ own.) For
instance, in the following description one teacher
(James) invoked embodied metaphors of liquidity
which I grouped under a provisional conceptual
category language learning as immersion.
EXTRACT 1. JAMES’S DESCRIPTION
I feel like I have soaked my limbs in my teaching
languages, although French [light blue colouring
of the shoulders and thighs] came before and it has
been longer since I dipped myself in the language,
whereas I have immersed myself in Spanish [red
colouring of the lower arms and hands] more
recently and it is still at my fingertips.
This description shows how liquidity is conveyed
through iteration of descriptors of immersion
into liquid (‘soaked, dipped, immersed’), which
are always linked to the person (myself, my limbs).
The prosodic repetition of liquidity signals that
language learning, for James, is associated with
varying degrees of immersion, a metaphor that
contrasts with the dominant mentalist metaphor
of sequential acquisition of knowledge that
stocks up inside the head. Other metaphors of
physical contact are analysed in the following
section.
505
FINDINGS: CONCEPTUAL METAPHORICAL
CATEGORIES
Human Body as Container of Languages
This was the broadest conceptual category
to be identified across the descriptions, which
appears unsurprising given that the activity itself
sets up containment within the body by asking
teachers to draw their languages onto a body sil-
houette, thereby metaphorising their languages
through the body. This category was common to
all descriptions except one (Jason, discussed in a
later section). However, ways of expressing the ex-
perience of containment in the body varied as the
part-of-body-to-whole relationship differed to ex-
press variable degrees of intensity and emotional
association. Most teachers (n = 19) restricted
their drawing or colouring to within the body
drawing, whereas others (n = 7) drew or coloured
beyond the contours of the silhouette. Of those
who did draw outside the silhouette, one person
clothed her body drawing with a cloak, while an-
other five drew a hat and/or hair. In some cases
(n = 4), the body drawing was framed by another
pattern outside the silhouette, like rays of light
or energy fields, especially around the head area.
Andrew, from Scotland (see Appendix), drew
the Scottish flag behind his head as a backdrop.
The choice to focus on the head area follows
an established visual metaphor found across
cultures, that of the aura or halo: Stewart (2010)
demonstrates how the word aura itself occurs
most frequently (in corpus text analysis) in asso-
ciation with mystery, power, and wealth, “hovering
beatifically around the main body without being
fully integrated” (p. 42). Participants choosing
particular languages to represent through auras
may therefore be mapping these qualities onto
these languages and their experience of them.
Human Body as a Channel for Languages
Only one teacher (Jason) drew a more conven-
tional pictorial landscape—with sheep, fields, a
cloud, and a shining sun—as a background. The
choice to draw not only beyond the contours of
the body but to place the body within a pictorial
backdrop indicates a broader metonymic relation
between the part and whole. As well as being
unique in including a background scene for his
drawing, Jason was also the only person who
did not divide his body into sections and/or
label them, but instead drew flowing lines of
equal width coursing through the body. Jason’s
rather amusing description reads simply: “I am
a medium for languages to exist in the world.
506
They flow through me like rivers of light.” The
metonymic relation he constructs is not therefore
part-of-body-to-the-whole equating one-language-
to-a-repertoire (found in all other drawings), but
rather the body itself as a part of a broader picture
(the world) that metaphorises the human body
as a channel for languages. While some other
participants combined the container and channel
metaphors by both dividing the body into discrete
languages and representing languages as energy
flows, Jason was unique in inverting the domi-
nant metonymic relationship of languages being
contained within the body to his body being con-
tained within the world. It is unsurprising there-
fore that he explicitly metaphorised his body as
a conduit through which languages flow out into
the world. It is also telling that all other teachers
maintained a view of language(s) as solid entities
that constitute the repertoire within the person.
Mother Tongue as Core
The choice of body part to denote different
languages within one’s repertoire followed a
clear pattern in all drawings (except Jason’s)
of core-to-periphery, which equated to hierar-
chical perceptions of comfort, centrality, and
proficiency (mother tongue as core). Mother
tongues and most secure learnt languages were
represented by the head or the body trunk with
other languages being represented increasingly
peripherally down to toes and fingertips:
EXTRACT 2. JAMES’S DESCRIPTION
English [navy blue colouring of the head and body
trunk] is my mother tongue and will always be at
my core. However, I always have room for more
languages. I am not full. Russian [indicated by grey
colouring around one half of the waist] is a language
I have studied and I will always keep under my belt
but it will always be one of my side languages. I have
dipped my toe in Welsh and Romanian to varying
degrees [green and brown colouring around the
toes of each foot], as well as having a couple of
phrases of Zulu and Mandarin Chinese over the
years [indicated by purple and red colouring around
each ankle].
Here James constructs mother tongue as
core, both using the word “core” itself (explicit vs.
implicit metaphors are discussed by Steen, 1999)
and also reinforcing the metaphor by observing
that Russian will always be a “side language.” This
construction is embedded in the basic image
schema of embodied centre–periphery, which
was present in all descriptions (bar Jason). James
used metaphors of availability or accessibility to
The Modern Language Journal 99 (2015)
describe the languages he had most recently been
“immersed” in. As is common with British lan-
guage students, he had learnt French for longer
and more recently added Spanish. But the more
recent immersion in Spanish meant it was more
readily available—at his fingertips—whereas
French remained more deeply embedded (fur-
ther up the limbs nearer the core) although
less readily accessible. James left a white space
around his blue English core inside his silhou-
ette to indicate that he was “not full,” signalling
recognition of the potential for further language
growth. In combining language learning as
immersion with mother tongue as core, James
blends (Fauconnier & Turner, 2002) conceptual
categories to express different internal (within
the body) and external (his body in the world)
metonymic relations. This blending can be coun-
terposed with the model posited by the audit,
whereby an individual interacts with a language
to develop discrete competences; within such
a model the language as a unit remains intact
outside the body, and skills are learnt through
mental training.
Importantly, however, the core–periphery
continuum did not relate necessarily to profi-
ciency but to emotional intensity, as with family
languages or accents that may not be well known
but have strong affective resonance, such as Irish
or Welsh, as shown in the following extract.
EXTRACT 3. SOPHIE’S DESCRIPTION
Yellow across my chest is Gaelic which I have listened
to spoken by my Irish relatives throughout my life.
The centre–periphery distinction results from
setting up the expression of one’s linguistic reper-
toire through the human body as container
of languages metaphor, which inheres in filling
in a human silhouette shape and anthropo-
morphising affective relations to languages. If,
for instance, the activity had entailed drawing
one’s repertoire as a building, one might expect
stronger foundations at the base, whereas the
metaphorical orientation of depth (as solidity,
rootedness, and so forth) is expressed in the
human body as container of languages
metaphor around central organs, especially
the head and heart. Within the expression of
containment as centre–periphery (part-of-body-
to-the-whole) were the conceptual categories
of language knowledge as quantity and
language knowledge as strength. These,
as with other conceptual categories, were often
blended within one account. Chloe, for instance,
blends categories of space and strength.
Simon Coffey
EXTRACT 4. CHLOE’S DESCRIPTION
The purple represents my knowledge of Spanish,
which takes up less space in my head than French
and features less around my heart area. German (is)
on my elbows and knees as these are weak parts of
my body.
Body parts are therefore symbolic of strength
versus weakness, space and size, centre–periphery,
but other symbols were included which drew on
cultural icons and stereotype (shared symbolic
representations).
Language as a Colour and Language as a Symbol
In the drawings, languages were ordered into
a hierarchy by centre–periphery, but intensity
was also expressed through density of colour and
patterning. In keeping with Kramsch’s (2009)
analysis of written metaphorical responses,
many of the choices were structured by cultural
stereotypes (e.g., Latin languages as hot and pas-
sionate), and heritage languages figured as warm,
comforting colours, often across the heart area or
deep in the body. Mother tongue was mostly rep-
resented in vivid colours around the core (torso,
head, and/or heart) to denote depth of feeling,
with intensity indicated by vividness or brightness
of colour, for instance a red heart or a central
core of dark blue (James). However, mother
tongue English (mother tongue as core) was
also represented (n = 3) by white as a neutral
unmarked entity or as a luminous aura. Making
meaning by metaphorising emotions into colours
can be understood both by folk models (shared
truths) and by what corpus analysis can tell us
about semantic relations in metaphor construc-
tion. For instance, cool–cold, conveyed by neutral
white, can connote either negative (distant, un-
emotional) or positive (rational, controlled)
evaluation (Deignan, 1999). Two participants
portrayed mother tongue English or England
as green. When Gina states “I chose green for
English because it makes me think of ‘Green and
pleasant land’ in the hymn ‘Jerusalem,’” she is
drawing on an established cultural value—a tra-
dition which Blake’s poem itself echoes—of green
language (Williams, 1975) rooted in the archety-
pal green world (Frye, 1957) of the pastoral idyll.
National flags were the most commonly used
symbols both to explain colour choice and to de-
termine patterning (10 participants clearly drew
flag patterns on the body, whereas others used, to
differing degrees, colours associated with national
flags). Besides flags, other shared cultural repre-
sentations were often added to the body drawing,
507
for example, a Basque beret to represent French,
two mini portraits of Shakespeare in the head to
represent English, a cup of coffee to represent
Amharic (Karen, see Appendix). While most in-
terpreted their linguistic repertoire as comprising
traditionally delimited language systems, at least
two included accents and/or regional dialects.
EXTRACT 5. JENNIFER’S DESCRIPTION
The purple Scots dialect of Doric are forever
rhythms in my head, but I find it hard to speak them
in a natural way now.
EXTRACT 6. ANDREW’S DESCRIPTION
My legs being the stars and stripes of the American
flag (my use of American English and accent from
my mother), my head in front of the Scottish flag
[the Scottish flag is drawn behind his head] where I
was born and educated.
Andrew was the only participant to include as
“languages” both music and sexuality, extending
still further his interpretation of his plurilingual
repertoire.
EXTRACT 7. ANDREW’S DESCRIPTION
Turkish is in my belly (I lived there when young).
Mexican Spanish is in my mouth (I love Mexican
food and also lived there). My heart is the universal
language of music [blue notes are drawn over a
red heart; Andrew was a professional singer and
songwriter before becoming a teacher] and my pink
boxers the language of queer sexuality.
Further work is required to continue investigat-
ing the impact of such endeavours on pedagogy
and professional attitudes to the career of teach-
ing, but initial teacher feedback points to an ex-
tended conception of language learning framed
within broader affective and physical horizons as
teachers examined their relationship with their
language learning. I include here an example of
this re-examination from feedback I elicited later
from the teachers who participated in this study.
One of the teachers (Jennifer) subsequently used
language portraits with her own students. Now
in her first post, teaching French and German, a
year after the workshop, she sent me the following
feedback (reproduced with her permission).
EXTRACT 8. JENNIFER’S FEEDBACK A
YEAR ON
I really enjoyed drawing my language autobiography.
I would say it gave me a more geographical percep-
tion of myself and identity. (...) The exercise also
made me think of my accent and how language from
508
home and dialect has perhaps framed my interest
in languages, and is also something I don’t want
to lose—especially when I can sense new dialects
replacing that of the older generation in the North
East of Scotland. I actually did the same exercise
with my Year 9 [8th grade] classes last week. (...)
It was great hearing their conversations as some of
them obviously felt very boring, e.g., “I’m completely
English, I only do French at school.” But then their
friends would point out, “What about when you go
to Spain? What can you say in a restaurant?” And
then they would end up writing these key phrases
and they also coloured in languages they have a
particular interest in or distant ancestral history, or
that they’ve heard spoken but cannot understand a
word of. I asked them to create estimates based on
their drawings “If you have half an arm of French so
far, how different could this drawing look in say two
to five years’ time?”
In the first part of this excerpt, Jennifer
metaphorised her accent and home dialect as
resources, rooted in her personal geographical
trajectory, that can be lost or maintained; in the
second part, children were encouraged to chal-
lenge their view of themselves as monolingual
by reflecting on their plurilingual practices. This
distinction illustrates the contrast between the di-
achronic perspective of adult (autobiographical)
reflexivity and the synchronic reflexivity typical
of children and adolescents. Jennifer’s reflexivity
points to the broader awareness afforded by this
type of activity in developing “the teachers’ sen-
sitivity to language,” identified by García (2008)
within the languages awareness paradigm, as a
key “goal of teacher education” (p. 386). In the
following sections, I develop the discussion of this
metaphor analysis and suggest some implications
for teaching as well as research.
DISCUSSION
Each language portrait was unique in its blend-
ing of representations, as each story of language
learning is unique, and, of course, representa-
tional choices would change with subsequent
drawings, as one’s affective and embodied reper-
toire changes. As well as present dispositions, the
portrayal, as Mossakowski and Busch (2010) state,
“obviously refers to past experiences and future
intentions” (p. 166). The representation of an
embodied plurilingualism is, like all metaphors,
“highly constrained both by the nature of our
bodies and brains and by the reality of our daily
interactions” (Lakoff & Johnson, 1999, p. 96).
However, the metaphors evoked in this study are
not revealing of intensely personal inner worlds
but signal “public representations” (Gibbs, 1999,
The Modern Language Journal 99 (2015)
p. 160) that are recognisable, shared metaphori-
cal models, given that we can see the colours used
to signal French (navy blue) and Spanish (red
and gold), both on the national flags of France
and Spain and on textbook covers (Karen says
“in my folders, French is always blue” and Gina
recalls how “blue reminds me of French because
my folders at school were always navy”), as well
as holiday brochures and other public artefacts.
Metaphorical representations of passion and
logic, as respectively signalled by the heart and
the head, abound in idiomatic expressions and
pictorial representations.
Metaphors, therefore, do not reside in our
heads alone. Embodied experience is shaped
by culturally bound representations, so that, for
instance, British learners of Spanish associate the
language with warmth and vibrant colours. The
representation of the heart in particular as a site
of deep affect (n = 11), mostly in red, follows a
conventional symbol of the heart as the embod-
ied seat of emotions, a widespread (though not
universal; Niemeier, 2000), folk model. While this
most typically represented the mother tongue, the
heart could also show love or passion for a learnt
language. Similarly, the head was used to indicate
logic or rationality, mostly associated with English
mother tongue. Cultural variation demonstrates
that there is nothing intrinsic about, for example,
the range of colour perceptions that individu-
als associate with a language (“English” is not
green), but the representational association of
language and colour signals a chain of personal
and historical perceptual associations, which are
embedded in broader sense-making schema. Sim-
ilarly, representations of one’s plurilingualism
will vary over time and, while these are deeply
personal, they reflect at the same time social
constructions of metaphor which are culturally
modelled.
Bodily personification clearly covers a wide
range of possibilities for metaphor. With refer-
ence to personification in language, what these
metaphors
have in common is that they are extensions of onto-
logical metaphors and they allow us to make sense
of phenomena in the world in human terms—terms
that we can understand on the basis of our own mo-
tivations, goals, actions, and characteristics. (Lakoff
& Johnson, 1980, p. 34)
The recent turn to autobiographical accounts
of language learning experience demonstrates
that individuals invest in different languages in
complex ways that are connected to the worlds
(Trappes–Lomax, 2002) that they interact with.
Simon Coffey
Furthermore, such accounts show us how indi-
vidual psychological trajectories apprehend and
respond to—as well as contribute to the making
of—these worlds.
As teacher candidates become inducted into
the world of teacher professionalism, there is a
risk that their personal, experiential, and sensory
delight in languages becomes compartmen-
talised, marginalised by the routinised formats of
depersonalised, accountable knowledge. Drawing
language portraits affords reflexivity, an alterna-
tive mode of reflection on and awareness of
one’s own plurilingual repertoire, which differs
considerably from the linear view of language ac-
quisition sanctioned by language audits. As Stein
and Newfield (2006) state, “Bodies are reposi-
tories of knowledge, but these knowledges are
not always knowable in and through language:
[T]hey can be sensed, felt, performed, imagined,
imaged, or dreamed” (p. 921). The articulation of
metaphors serves, therefore, to render visible—
and thereby available for scrutiny—stereotypical
views, making the “tacit explicit,” as Freeman
(1991) affirms in his title.
Although the candidate teachers represented
here all have rich language histories, the inher-
ent, lived experience(s) of their languages was
not something that they had previously consid-
ered as relevant to themselves as teachers. The
activity required them to reflect on the languages
they knew and those that they had come into
contact with, to think about the people they had
met, and maybe key incidents that came to mind
associated with certain languages. In a group
where three foreign languages (French, German,
and Spanish) are accorded professional status, 24
different languages featured across the different
drawings, and that number represents only those
that participants named in their written descrip-
tions. Other languages expressed in the drawings
may not have been named.
The rich metaphorical use of language was
encouraged by drawing first and describing
afterward. The purpose of using language por-
traits is to avoid an immediate dependence on
descriptive language. It does not offer a definitive
description of what languages represent in the
lives of individuals, and it is no more or less
useful than a written autobiography, an informal
discussion of one’s variable language compe-
tences, or even the formal record of competences
enshrined in proficiency measures; rather, it
responds to a different need. Offering another
way to express a language autobiography affords
a means of expressing the plurilingual repertoire
that takes into account language(s) as embod-
509
ied and historically lived. The workshop brings
into relief, therefore, the cognitive–affective
dissonance between the teacher-as-purveyor-
of-measurable-knowledge and the teacher-as-
personally-invested-plurilingual.
The emotional relationship felt between in-
dividuals and languages in their repertoires
addresses particularly dichotomous assumptions
when comparing mother tongue and other learnt
languages, each embodied as different forms
of language capital in their professional lives.
So, what is the knowledge that native speakers
have of their mother tongue, and is this simply
a linguistic question? Beyond the linguistic, we
might ask, what other embodied qualities are
purveyed by the native speaker? The voice? Cul-
tural sensibilities? Rootedness in an imagined
cultural world? Such qualities are always embod-
ied and signal the underlying (and unspoken of)
dimension of performing one’s language in a
way that conforms to culturally bound narrative
representations (a particular French mannerism,
Italian elegance, and so forth). Yet embodied
experience—like linguistic proficiency—is not, as
we see in the descriptions presented here, fixed,
and leads us to challenge claims of legitimacy
around native and nonnative “expertise, affili-
ation and inheritance” (Rampton, 1990, p. 97)
beyond mere language knowledge towards scales
of affect and personal investment in cultural
modes of embodied storytelling.
As has been pointed out by Merleau–Ponty
(1962) and, more recently, by Lakoff and Johnson
(1999), the traditional division (in the Western
philosophical tradition) between our capacity to
conceptualise (seen as a mental activity—reason)
and our “faculties of perception and bodily move-
ment” (Lakoff & Johnson, 1999, p. 37) presents a
false dichotomy. Rather, our “image schemas are
(...) comprehended through the body” (p. 36),
and our plurilingual repertoire is not only linguis-
tic knowledge or capacity, but, as demonstrated in
these portraits and extracts, also a complex range
of emotional attachments and how these are felt
in our bodies (Kramsch, 2009) as, in the cases pre-
sented here, comfort–discomfort, surface–depth,
liquidity–solidity, internal–external.
IMPLICATIONS FOR TEACHING AND
RESEARCH
Professional development activities do not
cause good teaching any more than teaching
causes learning (K. E. Johnson, 2009). Instead,
Johnson suggests that learning and development
are more aptly framed “in terms of reasons
510
than causes (...) in a relationship of influence
rather than causality” (p. 116). The activity
presented previously falls within the type of
inquiry-based professional development activities
advocated by Johnson that attempt to “uncover
this relationship of influence that links teacher
learning and student learning” (p. 117), as it
brings into relief different stakeholders’ per-
ceptions of and emotional dispositions toward
language(s). Languages teachers, despite know-
ing instinctively that language learning is part of
a wider life project, are required by the “powerful
macro-structures (...) embedded in instructional
contexts” (K. E. Johnson, 2009, p. 77) to reduce
knowledge for instrumental aims, in a way that
lies in tension with their lived experience. An
alternative approach to the competences agenda
is to focus on how languages are experienced
by different people in different domains on
aesthetic and affective levels.
The language knowledge that teachers are
required to have that is sanctioned in teacher
education programmes reflects beliefs about the
reasons languages are taught in schools, echoing
Phipps and Levine’s (2010) question, “What
is language pedagogy for?” As this knowledge
evolves through teachers’ engagement in pro-
fessional practices, so does their “conception of
what language itself represents within the process
of language teaching and learning” (Joseph,
2002, p. 30); it is therefore apt to reflect on this
evolution and the emotional dispositions that
these changing attitudes sustain. Encouraging
a broader vision of both language and learning
provides a powerful tool for integrating classroom
practices into wider life experience (e.g., Why am
I learning this? What do I think about this? What
does this language mean to me?) and, as exempli-
fied by Jennifer, broadens learner conceptions of
monolingualism to a more nuanced plurilingual
understanding of language knowledge as always
partial and situated.
While the activity does not teach language, such
reflexivity forms part of the symbolic competence
proposed by Kramsch (2006), where this is un-
derstood to support the “growth of a (...) sense of
symbolic self, the development of his or her ability
to take symbolic action and to exercise symbolic
power” (Kramsch 2009, p. 199). In locating lan-
guages in the body and attributing symbolic qual-
ities to these, we are dealing, in the first instance,
with metaphors. But these sets of metaphors
are no less valid than the metaphor portraying
language as a unitary body of knowledge that
exists in the head and imbues an individual with
a set of discrete competences. Teacher education
The Modern Language Journal 99 (2015)
programmes are ideal impact locations for this
ground shift in the way we perceive language(s)
in our lives. In bringing together metaphor
analysis and multimodal narratives of language
learning, the contribution of this study lies both
in expanding the research agenda investigating
how languages are perceived and invested in dif-
ferentially, and in adding to the growing body of
strategies in teacher education designed to afford
a richer conception of language and learning.
CONCLUDING REMARKS
Measures of content knowledge are necessary
to establish a professional knowledge base, and
there is a healthy debate around the nature of
these measures. At the same time, measures are,
by nature, quantitative, and limited in how they
can represent subjective experience of language.
Proficiency scales, including language audits,
also represent language as unitary realms of
knowledge, that is, as disembodied, abstract
systems. Such benchmarks therefore need to be
complemented with a range of strategies that
acknowledge and develop individuals’ personal
investment in the language(s) that they are
teaching, investment that is both historical in the
person and alive with ongoing engagements.
The study of how languages are lived in and
through is clearly visible in the scholarly work on
migration memoirs and, to a lesser extent, on au-
tobiographical studies of language students and
teachers, but subjective experience of language
learning has only obliquely been addressed in
secondary school language teacher education
programmes. In this article, I highlighted some
of the conflicting discourses around conceptions
of language in the context of teacher education
and proposed one strategy for eliciting language
autobiographies in a way that valorises experien-
tial knowledge of language through metaphors
of colour and embodiment. The purpose of the
workshop presented was to extend the dominant
focus on knowledge as a mental construct and on
language as an abstract objective system toward
recognition of the former as highly affective and
embodied and the latter as a lived and subjective
engagement (Kramsch, 2009). Phenomeno-
logical work of this type defies descriptive and
replicable frames and therefore cannot be au-
dited in a rational scientific way, even though
we can learn a lot from the way languages are
constructed metaphorically and the emotional re-
sponses that these constructions reveal. The work
is interpretative, and the meanings taken from my
analysis can be contested, but this factor in itself
Simon Coffey
need not prevent teacher educators providing
the space to encourage subjective reflection on
teachers’ relationship with language(s). Framing
one’s linguistic repertoire as embodied, enacted,
and lived invokes questions about what is to be
expected of a language teacher. Whether native
or nonnative speakers, teachers are not teaching
students to become French (Spanish, Chinese,
and so forth), but to develop reflexivity vis-à-vis
their developing plurilingual and symbolic com-
petences. Such competences are not things in
themselves but link to participation in the wider
world, and this participation is constituted in the
first instance in our bodies.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank several people for the extremely
helpful feedback on earlier versions of this article,
especially the guest editors, Maggie Kubanyiova and
Anne Feryok, for their vision and perseverance, and the
anonymous reviewers for their extensive and supportive
comments. I am also grateful to MLJ’s editor Heidi
Byrnes for her original steering and to my colleagues
Guy Cook, Constant Leung, and Ben Rampton for
reading my initial draft.
NOTES
1 I purposefully refer to England rather than the
United Kingdom or Britain as Scotland has its own
education system, and the situation in Wales differs in
having mandatory Welsh requirements.
2 A two-year (2012–2014) EU–Lifelong Learning
Project called Plurilingualism and Language Autobi-
ographies (reference LLP GRP/12/282P).
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APPENDIX

Seven Descriptions Accompanying the Language Portraits

James

I feel like I have soaked my limbs in my teaching languages, although French [light blue colouring of
the shoulders and thighs] came before and it has been longer since I dipped myself in the language,
whereas I have immersed myself in Spanish [red colouring of the lower arms and hands] more recently
and it is still at my fingertips. English [navy blue colouring of the head and body trunk] is my mother
tongue and will always be at my core. However, I always have room for more languages. I am not full.
Russian [indicated by grey colouring around one half of the waist] is a language I have studied and I
will always keep under my belt but it will always be one of my side languages. I have dipped my toe in
Welsh and Romanian to varying degrees [green and brown colouring around the toes of each foot], as
well as having a couple of phrases of Zulu and Mandarin Chinese over the years [indicated by purple
and red colouring around each ankle].

Sophie
My main body (green) represents my native language English. The red is Spanish, my second language
and a colour I identify with my time living both in Spain and Mexico. Blue represents French, my third
language, which I believe requires more thought and logic. Yellow across my chest is Gaelic which I
have listened to spoken by my Irish relatives throughout my life. Light green [on hands] is Portuguese
which I have dabbled in at various points in my life over the past 5 years, and I have also lived close to
the Spanish/Portuguese border. Brown represents the small amount of Russian I learnt from a Kazak
friend and orange is Italian which I learnt from a friend I lived with in Paris.

Karen

I strongly associate the languages I know with colours. In my folders, French is always blue [covering
upper body and arms], German always green [lower legs] and Spanish with yellow [upper legs and
hands]. I associate my mother’s language, Amharic, with brown [feet and hair]. The red and green
represents Italian and the orange Chinese [coloured in forefingers of each hand]. My first thought was
514 The Modern Language Journal 99 (2015)
to divide the body into sections proportionately to match my levels of confidence in that language, but
I forgot English so somehow this section is so small! I am happy that it represented my head though.
The head is always associated with main things and English is my main language. I have drawn three
symbols because they come to mind when I think of that language: a burning sun for Spain [drawn on
right thigh], nature for Germany [a leaf drawn below left knee], and coffee [a cup drawn on left foot]
for Amharic, as it reminds me of the smell of the coffee ceremony.

Andrew
I initially thought of representing my languages as colours, but then realised there were so many that
have played a role in my life that I changed each language to the colours of flags—hence my legs being
the stars and stripes of the American flag (my use of American English and accent from my mother),
my head in front of the Scottish flag [the Scottish flag is drawn behind his head] where I was born and
educated. The languages on my arms are the ones I have learned as a teenager/adult: French, German,
Spanish, and Italian (also the language of my paternal grandfather). Turkish is in my belly (I lived there
when young). Mexican Spanish is in my mouth (I love Mexican food and also lived there). My heart is
the universal language of music [blue notes are drawn over a red heart, Andrew was a professional singer
and songwriter before joining the programme], and my pink boxers the language of queer sexuality.

Chloe
The yellow represents English, mother tongue. I chose this colour as it is luminous and represents
clearly how I see and understand the language. The green represents my knowledge of French and takes
up most of the space in my head, heart, and hands. Knowledge in my head, love for the language in my
heart, and the ability to manipulate, adapt, and use in my hands. The purple represents my knowledge
of Spanish, which takes up less space in my head than French and features less around my heart area.
German on my elbows and knees as these are weak parts of my body. I chose orange as it is the colour
of the cream that I applied throughout a knee injury. I can only remember bits of German from school.
Pink on my toes for the few words of Greek that I picked up on holiday—one word for each toe.

Gina

I chose green for English because it makes me think of ‘Green and pleasant land’ in the hymn
‘Jerusalem.’ Blue reminds me of French because my folders at school were always navy. Spain reminds
me of sunshine, hence yellow, and I always found German quite boring so picture it as brown. Latin
is white because I consider it a dead language so can’t have experience of the country. The hand (left
hand on a person) represents languages I know a few words of. Greek is turquoise because of the Greek
islands and on holidays there I have spent a lot of time on boats. Catalan wouldn’t fit on the hand but
is between French and Spanish as it is kind of like a mixture of the two linguistically.

Jennifer

The head is mainly pink and grey [French and English, respectively] as I think I’m closer to ‘bilingual’
in these two languages specifically [pink and grey from head to torso]. German is a central streak
[yellow from waist down through both legs to ankles] I’m still finding out more about in terms of
culture and dialects. Blue of Greek [shoulders] where I spent holidays for 13 years of my life and the
purple Scots dialect of Doric [central line through head and torso] are forever rhythms in my head, but
I find it hard to speak them in a natural way now. Spain, red at my feet, is always there and I really want
to put my feet there in Spain and develop the language. Italian is just green at the ankles. I have Maltese
in orange at my hands, having had greater exposure to the country over the past two years. Yellow and
pink (German and French) are languages I can speak in and think in and immerse myself in quite
freely.