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Invited Speakers: AILA-ASEAN Symposium
Dr. Mark Fifer Seilhamer
Singapore Association for Applied Linguistics (SAAL)
National Institute of Education, Singapore
Mark Fifer Seilhamer is a lecturer in the English Language and Literature academic group at National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He obtained his Ph.D. from National University of Singapore and has taught English language and linguistics courses in a variety of Asia-Pacific contexts, including Hawaii, Guam, Taiwan, and Japan. His research interests are diverse, but all are related in one way or another to language ideologies and language & identity. He has published articles in a variety of journals, including World Englishes, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, Asia Pacific Journal of Education, and Journal of Pragmatics. He has also written a research monograph entitled Gender, Neoliberalism and Distinction through Linguistic Capital: Taiwanese Narratives of Struggle and Strategy, published by Multilingual Matters.
Problematizing bounded language conceptualizations in the Singapore context
This talk expounds upon the argument put forth by Jørgensen, Blommaert, and others that sociolinguists, especially those working in multilingual contexts, should approach their investigations with linguistic features as the basic units of analysis, focusing attention on the indexical meanings of particular linguistic features in given contexts. To illustrate the validity of this argument in the Singapore context, I will discuss difficulties encountered as part of a research team investigating multilingual accommodation with a study design in which distinct bounded languages served as the fundamental analytical units. Problems were repeatedly posed by the fact that in the Singaporean context, restricting one’s speech to only those features typically associated with specific ‘languages’ is often a marked choice and the unmarked norm is instead to employ a variety of linguistic resources (languaging / translanguaging / polylanguaging), indexing locality and other indexicalities. These difficulties highlight the inadequacy, for both research and language policy, of clinging to a conceptualization of languages as separate bounded entities – especially in multilingual contexts.