Week 7

I had never really been exposed to what lingua franca was until I read Baker’s article in this weeks readings. Before I read this article I thought that English was a good bridge language for two people with different native languages because English is known as one of the most powerful languages globally. Reading this article gave me a lot of insight to things I had not thought of before or was just simply not aware of.  When Baker stated that language is used to both represent shared experiences and knowledge and to create those experiences (527) it made me think of how people who solely use English as a lingua franca relate to one another. I feel that even though they understand what the other person is saying, they might not be able to understand the concept behind it if they do not have knowledge of one another’s culture.   Another part of this article that really made me think more about the struggle of learning English as a Second Language or simply a lingua franca was when Baker stated that learners of English are not learning to join a single language community, but are ‘‘shuttling between communities’’ between the local and the global, in which a variety of norms and a repertoire of codes are to be expected (572).  The learners need to be able to keep their culture and gain insight on a new culture, and also now when to go back and forth between the new language and the new culture they are being exposed to. I brought this up to my parents and they explained to me that they are still so rooted in their Mexican culture because they still celebrate all the same things and have not changed their traditions, but instead have added new things to their culture. They feel that exposing my brothers and me to both cultures from the beginning was beneficial to us so that we were not completely out of the loop of either culture or language. The study done by Marra in the Maori workplaces was very interesting and I liked that it focused on the difficulties of understanding the interaction in those workplaces. The fact that they speak English in New Zealand has always made me think that it is the same kind of American English we speak here, but now I know that is not the case and even in the same workplace there can be differences in the way people communicate.