The first thing I narrated from my position as learner/ noticer, was my access the European languages, they all had similar forms. Fashion for example, was in all the European languages represented variations of the Greek moda, highlighting the historical and etymological foundation of so many European languages – and how this provides Europeans with access to meaning through visual (and phonological) proximity. I was not able to identify any pattern between Hindi, Mandarin, Hebrew, Thai, for example (interestingly of all the Asian languages represented Vietnamese is the only one to use Roman characters) Reflecting on the root moda, I narrated my connection to the English mode, the verb and noun form model –it’s relationship to both the verb to fashion, and its significance to fashion (the noun). I also observed that the French translation for the adjective fashionable – elegant – is also a word in English, with a related (polysemic), but not precisely the same (synonymous) meaning. This prompted me to point out the homographic proximity between French and English.
With those languages for which I do not have access. my focus became what I could notice about the repetition of / or differentiation of characters between noun verb and adjective form, the suggestion of affixes and where they might be in relation to the root word. I then invited the speakers of these languages to explain how it works. I commented that this gives me – the non-literate in the non-Roman script some access to the language which I can otherwise only appreciate on an aesthetic level.
One observation I made was that, when we looked at translations of communication – communicate – communicative – (much like the homographic, polysemic – fashion in English) – the Mandarin verb and noun is both homographic and homophonic. I also learned that, whilst being able to recognize Hebrew – I had never seen it being written – not realizing that, like Arabic, it was written right to left. This created some discussion around how we might read images differently having been conditioned to read text in a particular direction.
I was reacting to what I could see, and as Citton (2019, p. 2) suggests a significant part of our attentional behaviour is reactive, and this reaction ‘is massively conditioned by the sum of previous impressions and external circumstance.’ My positionality as a teacher interested in how languages work no doubt informed my reactive noticing. However, identifying and reflecting on aspects of positionality regarding what is noticed aims to move towards a non- normative noticing, what Robinson (2022, p. 24) calls noticing otherwise; the practices of both giving and taking notice having potential for change regarding the terms and time of attention (Ibid). The act of asking students to hand write in their own language on a whiteboard was in part an attempt to focus attention away from the digitally mediated space and into the classroom space, finding myself the model in noticer, in the hope that the students may find some value in noticing each other’s multilingual – multicultural identities.
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References
Citton, Y. (2019) ‘Attention Agency Is Environmental Agency’ in Waddick Doyle & Claudia Roda (ed.), Communication in the Age of Attention Scarcity, Cham, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, p. 21-32.
Robinson, D. (2022) ‘Ethics of performance and scholarship: Giving/ taking notice,’ Performance Matters Vol. 8 (1) pp. 24- 36