PROJECT PROPOSAL!

Topic
English language in the community, whichever one I end up working in.

Guiding Questions
To what purpose is English taught in the community? To what purpose does it seem to actually serve? How does it affect students’ cultural identity? What is the importance of learning English to the students and/or their families? Is the supposed importance actualized after learning it, or how often do benefits make themselves known?
When is English used? In what social context? Who uses it? How much is modified, and if any, what parts are? How does it seem to affect the setting when English is used? How do non-English speakers react to those who do speak it?

Methods
I plan to spend most of my time, when not teaching, observing the language use in the community. I’ll do this by venturing out and participating in daily life with either the students or woman I am working with, in either a small village or in Mae Hong Son. This should give me some knowledge of the practice linguistic usage of English, where, where, how, and who is using it. For the why, I will spend time talking with and discussing ideas of English with other teachers, students, and other English speakers that I meet. While this may be less open than direct observation, I am interested in how people perceive the language in relation to themselves and their community. As I will be teaching it, the needs of the community would seem to encompass speaking English or learning to speak it, so hopefully the work that I do will be interesting or relevant to the project. On the side, I plan to take plenty of photographs and take notes of conversations, and do some analysis of the community’s social structure, to give context to the work I plan to do.

Ethical Concerns
Part of my interest involves the ethics or values of English language teachers, and it is a small concern that I will find things about the work less morally correct than I would like, although I will refrain judgment until I have more knowledge about the community and their desires. Mostly I’ll be focusing on the sociolinguistics, which should be fairly straightforward and observable. When and if I spend time discussing with people their thoughts on English, I will have to be careful in approaching it the proper way, that will leave it open so people will feel free to express their feelings on it.

Plan of Action
Feb. 9-15
Get to Bangkok by the 11. Leave for Mae Hong Son that evening, arrive midday the 13th. Hopefully I will be assigned a place to work and move in there, and begin learning the routine and the area. Get through shock phase.

Feb. 16-22
Spend time observing the use of language in the community. Make note of where I hear English and in what context. Read more of Foundations in Sociolinguistics/Ethnography of Speaking. Teach, teach, teach!

Feb. 23- Mar. 1
Get out into the larger community, either rural or urban. Discuss with students or other teachers the importance of English, evaluate with observations. Continue reading texts, especially the ones on teaching. Consider my place within the English speaking community, and the my use of language with the language used around me.

Mar. 2-8
Spend more time on specifics (pidgining, code-switching) if anything has come up by then. Continue discussions on morality and values as related to English and English teaching. Begin to consider broader, community implications of the use of English, beyond mere individuals. Read parts of the Language Ecology of Thailand.

Mar. 9-15
Begin outlining thoughts for research paper. Hopefully have enough data to be able to decide which areas will be most productive for further in depth research. Read parts of Sociolinguistic Perspectives. Hopefully begin forming my own sociolinguistic perspective. Keep teaching.


Mar. 16-22
Relate my experience teaching with the experiences my students have learning, after dicussing with them. Tie into the social uses of language I’ve observed. Organize for travel next week. Plan on continued observation through more urban and tourist areas to add more to the research.

Mar. 23-29
Leave sometime this week for traveling. Meet up with Brenna in Bangkok, spend some time there, head south.

Mar. 30- Apr. 5
Keep hopping around the country. Visit Phuket, and then head northeast. Keep listening for different English usages and make not of them. Journal a LOT, and add to paper outlining.

Apr. 6-12
End up back at base camp this week, get back into teaching and working. Start writing draft, evaluate travel experience with language against the experience I had in the beginning. Do more academic research on thoughts that came up if possible, if not, pose questions that I would like to know the answer too.

Apr. 13-19
Keep working on paper and having discussions with those who I live with. Spend time going to areas rural or urban that I have not been. Ideally I will have enough of a back ground to be able to analyze betting the linguistic interactions that are happening. Target things that I hadn’t noticed before, but do notice now.

Apr. 20-27
Prepare to return home. Do lots of field work and journaling, try and have 10-20 rough pages of paper. Take lots of photographs, spend time with those who I’ve worked a lot with. Leave for Bangkok the 25.


Apr. 28- May 5
Return home! Finish paper and any more reading or research I couldn’t get done. Find somewhere to live in Olympia. Go back to Evegreen.



Bibliography
1. Johnston, Bill. Values In English Language Teaching. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers, 2003.

This examines the what should be the values of teaching from the teaching side, which I feel will help me look at the values of English language learning. Examples come from multiple areas around the world, including Thailand.

2. Hymes, Dell. Foundation In Sociolinguistics: An Ethnographic Approach. Philidephia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1974.
Sociolinguistics here represents a whole language, including the way it is communicated, that is purpose is further than simply ‘linguistics’ and that there are issues with the way linguistics are approached. The parts about the relationships between linguistics and other humanistic studies will be the most interesting and important to me.

3. Cheshire, Jenny. English Around the World: Sociolinguistic Perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
This is a large collection, one that I will read the parts that pertain to Thailand. It is a very Western (it seems) and academic essay that covers the social contexts in which English is used as well as the variations in the language itself around the world. It also looks at the history of English, and how this language gained prominence over any other, and unlike any other language.

4. Bauman, Richard, and Joel Sherzer. Explorations in the Ethnography of Speaking. 2nd ed. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1989.
A study in the “social and cultural foundations of language”, again a large collection of many academic papers, it covers broadly topics about the role, use, and function of language in social contexts. It is aimed toward an audience of multiple differing academic disciplines.

5. Smalley, William A. Linguistic Diversity and National Unity: Language Ecology in Thailand. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.
Different than the other texts I have selected, this examines Thailand’s own differing languages other than English, but also how the integrity of language has changed over time. Deciphering how English fits into this is briefly approached, but mostly I hope to use this to give myself a greater understanding of where language fits into lives of the Thai. The author was also a “missionary linguist,” which may give him a certain idea of proper linguistics.

6. Holbrow, Marnie. The Politics of English: a Marxist View of Language. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications Ltd., 1999.
I’m primarily just reading the chapter entitled “Money Talks” to get a more extreme view of the international spread of English. It gives more of w a sense of the ideological or global aspects of the language. The book is written by a professor of the School of Applied Language and Intercultural Studies at Dublin City University, and has many ideas about the power and economics of the spread of English.