Transcript

Maria:

Hello. My name’s María Fernández-Toro. I work at The Open University and I’m here with three colleagues from the Magicc Project, which is a multilingual project that brings together colleagues from universities all across Europe, and the purpose of this project is to develop a clear description of what it entails to be multilingual and multicultural in higher education. So I’m here with Teija from Finland. Hello Teija.

Teija:

Hello.

Maria:

Nadia from Switzerland.

Nadia:

Hello.

Maria:

And Jim from the UK.

Jim:

Hello.

Maria:

And we are going to be discussing um our experience as part of the Magicc project team. The peculiarity of this project team is that we all speak in English, but there are very few actual native speakers of English in the group. So I wanted to ask you, the first question I wanted to ask you was um, what do you think are the advantages and the disadvantages of speaking English in the project?

Nadia:

Well I think the biggest advantage of speaking English is that everybody understands. We are approximately, except those who are natives, we are at the same level I think mostly and it’s also the language of the theories and of the or … linguistics and … [inaudible] that we are using. So that’s the biggest advantage of using English. But the disadvantage of using English is sometimes it’s tiring. So, it would be so much easier to speak some other languages than English and listening all the time because it’s not the easiest language for instance for me, so for me it’s a little bit tiring.

Maria:

Would you agree with this view of the advantages and disadvantages?

Jim:

Well, um, I have the big advantage that everybody is speaking the language which I speak as a first language. So in terms of feeling tired or not, actually it’s quite interesting to be honest there is something tiring for me or it is sometimes difficult for me to stay focused on some of the … on some of the interactions. We’re dealing with quite complex topics. Added to that is the fact that people are speaking English as an additional or second language and are not always completely um accurate, from my point of view, in the way that they’re expressing themselves. So I am having to make those kinds of adjustments in my listening and I must confess sometimes I drift off.

Nadia:

Yeah, well I would agree that it must be frustrating to listen to people who are always making imprecise er discourse and as a non-native and quite tired person [laughs] I must say that I’m very much frustrated because I cannot be precise in my … in my interventions. I cannot rely on jokes. I cannot rely on quotations that the other people or references that the other people would understand without me explaining what I mean, which would be different in my own language of course. And um the frustration is it can be on both sides. But on the good side it’s clear that if we hadn’t a lingua franca, whatever it be, we couldn’t work together. There wouldn’t be any possibility of switching languages, from languages all the time. So we need to have some kind of common understanding. It would be, but it’s quite frustrating in the long term because you never develop the kind of vocabulary you need in, I mean, you have to learn it. You don’t have the nuance. You don’t have all the special er inflection that you would like to put into your interventions or, this is difficult to … it’s difficult to speak and it’s difficult to listen.

Maria:

What does it feel in terms of your identity? Do you think it does something to your identity when you are in a group like this?

Teija:

I think it does because er I do agree with Nadia because if I were speaking Finnish or even French, I would make jokes and I would have the different kind of vocabulary and different kinds of sentences. And now I’m losing a great part of my identity with English because it’s not a very good language that I speak, though I don’t speak it very well.

Maria:

Does it work both ways?

Jim:

Yes. It’s interesting. I mean, the first thing I want to say is that I’m actually overawed by the language ability of the people in the group, that I feel very inadequate in comparison. What I mean by that is that I’m … most of the time I’m aware that people are speaking English as an additional language and how well they are doing it, you are doing it. So that’s an important thing. It kind of reminds me, when I lived in the Netherlands, where people speak English very well as well, I’d go on and I’d forget that I was in a foreign country, and suddenly they would behave in a Dutch way and I’d sort of think ‘why don’t you behave properly?’ Because I’d forgotten [laughter] that they actually weren’t English people and they were speaking in, they weren’t speaking their own language. So I think there’s a bit of that as well in the group that I can forget that people are speaking English as another language. But a large part of the time I’m very overawed really at the ability which people are showing. And I feel somewhat diminished as well, so my identity feels reduced as well in some way.

Nadia:

I’d like to add that one thing which is really difficult on the long term is that it takes so much time to say the same thing. I mean if I had to explain, well I am working in software design, so we had a software design group today and I had to explain slowly each step because it’s not natural for me to do it in English. I do it in French usually. So it does take so much more time. It’s really difficult for the other people because they could go quickly in the same work. So, and if you add all this time lapse that er everybody is taking to explain things then it doubles the time you need to do the same task which is, well it’s better than not doing the task at all, but sometimes you just say, if we could just spend one sentence and one minute to explain what we need and that’s it because it would take no more than one minute if I had to tell it in French.