Bryan Meadows PhD Candidate Second Language Acquisition and Teaching GIDP TALGS (5th Annual TESOL Applied Linguistics Graduate Student) Conference February 16, 2008 Greenville, NC

ABSTRACT

At its most fundamental level, national identity is a process of distinguishing the self from the other. This binary distinction is replicated within the discourse of a national community at multiple levels and across multiple contexts thus creating complex intertextual (i.e., interrelated) chains of self-other distinctions which collectively serve to legitimize a coherent national identity. The simple binary logic of the self-other distinction can obscure the dialectic relationship shared between the two poles. Following Bakhtin’s treatment of the Dialogic (Bakhtin 1981), the self and the other are entirely relational terms existing only to define one another. In other words, in defining the self, one is at the same time reflexively defining the other. Nation-states exploit the binary, but also dialectic, nature of the self-other distinction in order to construct what has been termed an ‘international universal order’ (Billig 1995). The image of the international universal order is one of neat orderliness and clear national boundaries. Each nation recognizes the political, social, and cultural boundaries of the other, and it is in this mutual reciprocity that each individual nation reflexively legitimates its own identity and continued sovereign existence.
Those who endeavor to learn a foreign national language such as second language learners, however, represent a challenge to these perceived clean national boundaries precisely because second language learners actively attempt to cross them. In other words, second language learners deliberately attempt to reconcile the other with the self. Second language learners have the potential to provide insights into the workings of national identities and the ideologies which support them precisely because their trans-national positioning fosters a heightened awareness of dominant discourses about the self and other nation-states. Thus, discussions between second language learners can serve as productive sites for investigating dominant national ideologies. To this end, this study brings together three second language learners of Japanese to collaboratively discern the national cultural borders of the United States (self) and Japan (other) with the purpose of surfacing dominant national ideologies to which second language learners are especially sensitive.
Discourse analysis of the three second language learners’ interaction combines methodology typical of Conversation Analysis (Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson 1974) with a theoretical sensitivity to indexing as a discursal process (Duranti 1997; Ochs 1992) and the reproduction of ideologies at the interpersonal level (Gal & Irvine 1995; Woolard 1998) as featured in linguistic anthropological studies. Analysis highlights the interlocutors’ localized co-construction of Japanese authenticity and their treatment of that authenticity in light of the particular goal of their activity which was to design a ‘Japan booth’ to represent Japan in an upcoming international festival to be held on their American university campus. The interlocutors indexed their privileged positioning in the margins between two national communities in two ways. First, they co-constructed a stance of trans-national authority to determine Japanese-ness deeming symbols such as kimonos, swords, and pop music as authentically Japanese. On the other hand, other symbols (such as an inflatable sumo wrestler play-suit) were determined to be inauthentically Japanese and dismissed from inclusion in the festival booth. More strikingly, the group also indexed their trans-national stance of authority by determining not only the authenticity of a given symbol but its appropriateness in representing Japan to an American audience. Namely, some symbols (e.g., select food items and seasonal kimono dress) were determined to be too-authentically Japanese for the American audience and were rejected for inclusion in the festival booth.
The festival booth product which emerges from this videotaped interaction is one which includes symbols chosen not for their authenticity but for their familiarity to the American audience as the exotic Japanese other. For this, I propose the term, the familiar exotic which can be defined as a collection of symbols conventionalized to index a foreign-other community.
The familiar exotic reveals a sophisticated awareness of national ideologies which can only be developed by those who actively cross national boundaries of language, culture, and identity. In determining authenticity and appropriateness, these second language learners drew upon their sophisticated understanding of dominant national ideologies circulating in the dominant discourses of both national communities (i.e., the self America and the other Japan). As the familiar exotic draws on dominant national ideologies, dialectically, it also contributes to them as it reifies a conventionalized exotic other which serves to reflexively identify and legitimize the national understanding of self and its legitimate sovereignty. Thus, the familiar exotic is a portrait of an other which coincides, and in turn validates, the self American worldview.
The familiar exotic, as a potential analytical device, holds promise for shedding further light on language learners’ re-negotiation of self and other as they traverse international and cultural borders. The familiar exotic can also contribute to treatments of second language learner identity which focus on the management of social categories during language acquisition as a key to understanding learner identity re-organization. Such approaches assume that as second language learners increase their participation in a new community, they discern more complexity in the general social organization of that new community. They develop sophisticated understandings of other national ideologies and learn to reconcile them with the national ideologies of the self community.

References
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Woolard, K. (1998). Language Ideology as a Field of Inquiry. In B. Schieffelin, K. Woolard, & P. Kroskrity (Eds.), Language Ideologies: Practice and Theory (pp. 3-47). New York: Oxford University Press.