Acquiring Resilience

 I have the honor to be participate in an International symposium about Foreign Language teaching and Learning Research in Japan (Link). The event is a real multilateral event, because it organized by organizations of six countries (Germany, China, France, Spain, South-Korea and of course Japan). I am an expert in a workshop-group  "Society and Multilingualism". There has been also presentations, before the symposium, which are accessible after a registration, but am unable to share them here publicly. My colleagues already started to discuss the topic "Multilingualism and Society" in an (closed) forum in an Moodle-environment provided by the Goethe-Institut. The chairman of our workshop-group has provided us with guidance topics for the discussion: 

1) How can we push Japanese companies (maybe the government also?) and make them accept students’ plurilingual ability properly?

2) How can we advocate pluralistic identities of plurilingual people (not just as a split identity) in a double-monolingual (only Japanese and English) society like Japan?

I will discuss these two topics and will add a third topic, which is the headline of the blog (Acquiring Resilience, WpE). 

I think it is very difficult to force (Japanese) companies towards Multilingualism. Japanese multinational companies, like Toyota or Rakuten are indeed multilingual, because they using Japanese and English. For German companies it is the same. And that is referring to the "elephant in the room", the big avoided topic until now and that is the role of English. Is English impeding Multilingualism or stimulating it? Of course this question is very difficult to answer in short, but the whole structure of this blog should make my opinion clear: English can be an important agent for Multilingualism, if used properly. And this is leading to the second topic: How can plurilingual people and their identities be promoted. And here schools have indeed an important role. But the problem here in Japan is that the basic tool for the promotion of Plurilingualism, the English language is not working smoothly here in Japan. Again a long discussion is needed for this topic, there no simple reasons for this. But it seems to me a good idea to invest in the English education in Japan. I would also like to help here and this is also one reason of this blog. But it is difficult for me to work for the English education in Japan, because I am not an English native speaker. A student of the Chukyo University did a survey on the JET program in Japan and it is indeed very difficult to get a position as a teaching assistant, if you not coming from an Inner circle English speaking country (UK, USA, Australia or Canada, see World Englishes (WpE) for background). With the exception of Canada (French) and the Republic of Ireland, which is still an English speaking country, officially English in multilingual contexts is then not recognized. Then the third point resilience. I had a surgery this year, not a big deal, but I had to go in a hospital for a few days. Everything was working fine and fortunately nobody tried to speak English (or even German) to me in the Hospital. Japanese worked fine for me and I did not have to learn English part of the body vocabulary for this medical treatment. Of course I had to learn some new words in Japanese and this is essential, because I also have to speak to my wife about my condition and for this I also needed the Japanese words. I am not saying that this the way for all residents with a non Japanese mother tongue. However, for resilience inside Japan, Japanese is needed. But there is more, because Japan is necessarily a very resilient country. Earthquakes are often here and what is seen as the Fukushima disaster worldwide is seen as the Tohuku earthquake and tsunami in Japan (Wp-link). For international cooperation in more and more difficult times English is needed, but that is not the English only of the inner circle countries. But what about other languages then? Of course there is more, the multilingual repertoire of the society, which is a world society. Here the Internet provides us with opportunities, but the opportunities of Wikipedia or Duolingo will be covered in another post.