When I was young, Japanese happened to me at school. It was external to me, geographically distant. I was here and Japanese was there. I was a native speaker of English and Japanese belonged to other people.
I ended up marrying into Spanish, and now any feeling of belonging fluctuates with the context in which I find myself. It generally depends on the degree of acceptance I feel from a person or group, either in English, Spanish or both. This makes me far more ordinary than not. Speaking one variety of a language with prescribed boundaries is actually a more uncommon experience. It goes hand-in-hand with the collective imaginary of nations.
To be a native speaker is to belong to a place, commonly to a nation/country, or one of a group of ‘monolingual’ countries linked to a language, such as English. Particular varieties of a language also tend to be upheld as what a native speaker sounds like. This is the 'right' way of speaking.
Monolingualism is clearly rewarded, so is there any issue with a monolingual imagination? I spent a lot of time learning Japanese as a high school student and then a university student, and my dream was to sound just like a Japanese person. I felt flattered when people were pleasantly surprised at my Japanese because I wanted to fit in.
If people don’t sound like a monolingual in a particular language, they are often judged and found wanting. English enjoys the status of a lingua franca, and my (English) language knowledge and experience were respected in Japan. However, it is so often the case that students’ linguistic knowledge and experience are disregarded. I have witnessed this disregard happening to the linguistic knowledge base of many of my students.
A deficit view of language is an insidious problem in education. The native ideal is based mostly on where you were born and grew up. However hard you try, growing up with a different language is hard to do. The way people sound also gets compounded with the way they look. This has a big effect on a sense of belonging at school, not just the learning of content.
So it is not easy to measure up to monolingual norms for various reasons. What if you grow up as a second-generation immigrant with one or both parents speaking the language but being immersed in the societal language? What kind of a native speaker are you in this case? Where is your place in the monolingual imagination?
It’s not impossible to sound like a monolingual in another language later in life - many of us know someone who is truly amazing at learning languages. But a bi/multilingual is, by definition, not monolingual, even if they think their languages need to be kept separate.
We use the language we use according to what we want to say and to whom. We just imagine language to be compartmentalised when we think about what we know and do. I speak English and Spanish. I want to improve my Japanese. That kind of thing.
You could say that our monolingual imagination is just too strong. We should teach language - or expect our students to use language - according to what we think a native speaker sounds like, or what the textbook says and be done with it.
But then, what are we doing to our students? What message are we sending them? What opportunities to connect existing knowledge and new knowledge are we missing?
In our classrooms, in our teaching, we don’t need to imagine language in this way. We can have a different kind of imagination while still understanding that any standardised language of schooling/the textbook is important for doing well at school.
Using and learning language is a goal in itself: to make connections and increase and deepen knowledge. And, even more importantly, the goal is for students to feel a sense of belonging, and an understanding that they have an authentic voice that’s worth something. Knowledge that’s worth something.
The native/non-native speaker divide can cause harm both to students and teachers. To the student who gets stereotyped and mocked by their peers for their way of speaking English. To the teacher who is stereotyped and treated with suspicion: do they really know their content?
Privileging diverse language experiences and knowledge more broadly can bring depth and quality to education. It can even help with the standardised teaching and learning objectives in current systems.
In our collective imagination, especially in the world of English language teaching, the idea of native speaker appears to be very hard to shake. But in our own personal imaginations? There can exist a whole world of possibility.