Wow! eBook
Learning the Arts of Linguistic Survival: Languaging, Tourism, Life
Author(s): Alison Phipps (Author)
- Publisher: Channel View Publications
- Publication Date: 15 Dec. 2006
- Language: English
- Print length: 216 pages
- ISBN-10: 184541053X
- ISBN-13: 9781845410537
Book Description
In this ground-breaking contribution to the study of tourism and languages, Alison Phipps examines what happens when tourists learn to speak other languages. From ordering a coffee to following directions she argues for a new perception of the relationship between tourism and languages from one based on the acquisition of basic, functional skills to one which sustains and even strengthens intercultural dialogue. The twelve chapters comprising this book tell stories of the experience of learning and speaking tourist languages. Drawing on a range of disciplines Alison Phipps takes the reader on a journey through risk, way finding, mistakes, laughter, conversations and the imagination. She provides rich descriptions of the world of language learning which has remained invisible to mainstream studies of language education, existing as it does on the margins of educational life. She shows how tourism is shaped by the learning experiences of everyday life. Languages, she argues passionately, fundamentally change the nature of perception, dwelling and relationships to other people and the world. This book will be essential reading for all those interested in tourism studies and in modern languages education. It is a timely study, coming at time of crisis in languages, as English exerts its power as a world language and as a dominant language of tourism. Learning the Arts of Linguistic Survival: Languaging, Tourism, Life will also be of interest to anthropologists, linguists, geographers, sociologists and those studying education.
Editorial Reviews
Review
Alison Phipps has written a thought-provoking and unusual book, which deserves to be read by tourism academics and, perhaps even more so, by those in mainstream language education who are struggling to keep their discipline alive.
--Frances Brown "Tourism Recreation Research 34(1) 2009"
Alison Phipps' Learning the Arts of Linguistic Survival is an inspiring, intellectually and morally provocative book, which is nothing short of a state of the art of theorizing tourism and tourists from a language-sensitive or language-oriented perspective. Phipps offers a view of tourists that is rare and refreshing, and builds on well grounded approaches, which, in my mind, can be generally labelled "post-structural." Through applying these dynamic and critical perspectives, and not taking anything for granted, Phipps attends to the seemingly ordinary spheres of tourism, and to where the extraordinariness of tourism meets the ordinariness of everyday lives. This juxtaposing--of tourism and everydayness--turns out to be remarkable, because it shows how rather interesting and worthy are everyday lives of some people. In other words, through researching tourists, we gain a contribution to what might we might call the "contemporary human condition," over and above the contribution to "tourism scholarship."
--Chaim Noy, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem "Tourism Review International"
Language and difference have always pushed against the boundaries of certainty, authoritarianism, and hope. In this beautifully written, poetic, and brilliantly insightful book, Alison Phipps addresses the social, cultural, and political implications of learning to speak a tourist language and its broader implications for a meaningful sense of dialogue, cultural change, and democracy itself. Moreover, Phipps offers us a new way of understanding learning as a form of public pedagogy that takes place outside traditional sites of learning and in doing so constitutes a pedagogical space rich with the possibilities of desire, agency, and a global cosmopolitanism. This may be one of the most important books written on language, pedagogy, and tourism in the last fifty years and hopefully will be widely read by anyone wishing to enter the changing conditions of a global democracy.
--Henry Giroux, McMaster University, Canada.
This book is worth reading for reasons of content, style, and mode of research. In concert with other publications in the series, such as Tourism and Intercultural Change: Why Tourism Matters, it is passionately written, electrifying, and insightful. The book is recommended for all interested in the complex relationship between tourism, language, intercultural dialogue, and human interaction.
--Melani Nekic "KULT Online Issue 19 (2009)"
This is a very unusual book that should be read by an unusually wide audience as it crosses a number of boundaries, and thereby questions comfortable assumptions inherent in many of the disciplines it touches upon. Modern language professionals have tended to look down upon the practices of learning languages for tourism, and yet, Phipps demonstrates, they have much to learn from these. In tourism studies again little attention has been paid to language learning relative to the economic aspects of tourism or the critical focus on the tourist gaze, for example. This is a work of linguistic anthropology or 'auto-anthropology' as Phipps puts it which focuses on the self as guest (who is trying to be a good guest), rather than the self as host, through 'languaging'. Phipps's original take, and lively prose, as well as her commitment to her subject, make this a really good read which should shake us language professionals out of some of our dearly-held prejudices!
--Judith Still, University of Nottingham, UK
This lively book provides an intriguing view of why we still want to learn foreign languages. Others have seen tourism as sounding the death knell for language learning: Phipps takes the opposite view and shows how travel actually motivates ordinary people to try and communicate in a new language. She goes so far as to suggest that tourism may even be the single phenomenon that enables most intercultural encounters for the greates number of people in today's world. I found myself questioning many long-held assumptions after reading Phipps' provocative book.
--Susan Bassnett, University of Warwick, UK
About the Author
Alison Phipps is Director of Graduate Development for Arts, Humanities and Education at the University of Glasgow, where she teaches modern languages, comparative literature, anthropology and intercultural studies. Her books include Acting Identities (2000), Contemporary German Cultural Studies (ed. 2002), Modern Languages: Learning and Teaching in an Intercultural Field (2004) with Mike Gonzalez, Critical Pedagogy: Political Approaches to Languages and Intercultural Communication (ed. 2004) with Manuela Guilherme and Tourism and Intercultural Exchange (2005) with Gavin Jack.
Alison Phipps is Director of Graduate Development for Arts, Humanities and Education at the University of Glasgow, where she teaches modern languages, comparative literature, anthropology and intercultural studies. Her books include Acting Identities (2000), Contemporary German Cultural Studies (ed. 2002), Modern Languages: Learning and Teaching in an Intercultural Field (2004) with Mike Gonzalez, Critical Pedagogy: Political Approaches to Languages and Intercultural Communication (ed. 2004) with Manuela Guilherme and Tourism and Intercultural Exchange (2005) with Gavin Jack.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Learning the Arts of Linguistic Survival
Languaging, Tourism, Life
By Alison Phipps
Multilingual Matters
Copyright © 2007 Alison Phipps
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84541-053-7
Contents
Acknowledgements,
Introduction,
1 Languages, Tourism and Life,
2 Educating Tourists,
3 Risks,
4 Way Finding,
5 Pronunciation,
6 Conversations,
7 Games,
8 Rehearsing Speech,
9 Breaking English,
10 Tourist Language Learners,
11 Surviving,
Afterword,
Bibliography,
Index,
CHAPTER 1
Languages, Tourism and Life
I think I must be entirely mistaken. I must be in the wrong place. I'm here to enroll in a six-week course in Tourist Italian. The place is mobbed. We are queuing up outside the classroom door. It's like being in a vortex of the over-60s. There are no men anywhere to be seen. All is chatter and excitement and umbrellas. The contrast to my day job could not be more marked.
Why Bother?
Why do people bother to learn another language for tourist purposes? On the surface of things the answer would appear to be simple. Tourism concentrates multilingual and intercultural experiences significantly. It does so at times of great symbolic significance to tourists, times that are anticipated and that are associated, socially, culturally and often personally, with happiness. In order to survive in the multilingual, intercultural worlds of tourism being able to speak the language is an obviously advantage.
But in a globalising world that speaks English and assumes English to be a lingua franca there is nothing obvious about learning other languages. I teach languages to undergraduate students on degree programmes and our programme, like programmes in modern languages across the western world – languages other than English that is – is in crisis. The number of students applying for undergraduate courses is declining, and the siren voices asking what 'use' such courses are grow more shrill by the minute. The past decade has simultaneously seen an unprecedented growth in mobility across international borders and a decline in the learning of languages other than English in the mainstream of higher education across the globe.
At the same time the learning of languages for tourist purposes has become a growth industry. New beginner, intermediate and advanced courses proliferate across the spectrum of adult education and so-called lifelong learning.
Thick with Languages
Tourist destinations and sites are marked places, thickened through the actions of tourists and the work of hospitality. To the grounded, placed, rooted nature of beaches or museums or cathedrals or exhibitions, tourism brings people, with their personal belongings, their modes of attire and with their languages. Destinations undergo material change in cultural, social and physical ways in order to accommodate visitors and their needs. Tourists, put simply, are temporarily leisured people (Bauman, 1996) out of place (Robinson & Andersen, 2002). Although tourists are recognisable as such visually – their attire and belongings point to their mobility and leisure – they are also audibly different, speaking in languages and accents that are also out of place, often clumsy or inappropriate or loud.
Mary Douglas argued that 'dirt is matter out of place' (Douglas, 1966). As matter 'out of place' languages and tourists are invariably perceived to be problems, to be dirt, out of place, requiring solutions that will tidy up the linguistic confusion and cultural disorder that threaten the order of things, the way things are habitually carried on. As such languages have come to be considered as basic skills required by the tourist industry for its smooth, efficient running and by tourists for 'getting by' successfully. Part of the way in which the perceived disorder of multilingual tourism is dealt with by the travel industry is to train and pay people to act as a translation interface with those who arrive at a place where their native language is not spoken. Addressing the 'skills-shortage in languages' is a tourism management refrain. To be a good host, these days, is to be able to speak words of welcome – be it on websites, in tourist brochures, and as tour guides – in languages that are comprehensible, and even native to the tourists. To be a good host – in Cronin's terms (Cronin, 2003) – is to also be a translator.
But there is another side to this equation. However thick an intercultural and multilingual experience tourism may be, the opportunities for speaking the languages of the hosts are often so limited and so systematically and even technologically frustrated as to force the question again: why bother? Why bother to learn another language as a tourist? Why bother, when brochures, guidebooks and service staff speak the common languages of the tourists. Because people do. Large numbers of people – many more than those studying for language degrees in universities – attend classes in adult and continuing education in order to learn languages that they might be able to use when on holiday. This is the key paradox which is the catalyst for the explorations in this book.
The air is full of strange sounds. Snatches of conversation reach my ears. Some enter. ... German ... Austrian ... French ... American ... Australian ... Italian ... Spanish ... English ... Scots ... Lancastrian ... Portuguese ... Swabian ... Dutch ... Japanese ... and are locatable, sometimes they are comprehensible, taking me off into other worlds away from this one, through the trigger of sound on memory. I turn to my friends and speak to them in French. My partner speaks to me in English. I listen to the guide, and the commentary is German. Another guide moves forward and the place is animated with Portuguese. The tourists around me are speaking, listening, reading, some are writing. This is an intensely multilingual place.
Tourism is an intensely multilingual, intercultural experience in which the opportunities for speaking the language of the destination are often very limited. Even in an age when English is used as one of the most common languages of tourist communication, opportunities for speaking English in London, or Edinburgh or New York or Cape Town, are often limited to the moments of meeting members of the service industry – ordering coffees, buying stamps or tickets, booking in to a hotel or camp site. And, again as Cronin argues, such destinations are multilingual places, where the inhabitants may well not speak English themselves, as migrant workers in the service industry (Cronin, 2003). Linguistic and also economic power is involved in the languages used by hosts and guests alike within the tourism industry. The dominant situation is comparable to the one characterised by Nuñez:
Perhaps the most striking example of the asymmetry in host-guest relationships is to be found in linguistic acculturation in which the usually less literate host population produces numbers of bilingual individuals, while the tourist population generally refrains from learning the host's language. The cadre of bilingual individuals in a tourist-orientated community or country are usually rewarded. The acquisition of a second language for purposes of catering to tourists often results in economic mobility for people in service positions. Interpreters, tour guides, bilingual waiters, clerks, and police often are more highly compensated than the monolinguals of their...
