The Linguist

32 The Linguist Vol/62 No/4 thelinguist.uberflip.com OPINION & COMMENT How a scheme that promotes a passion for languages helped one school pupil embrace his multilingual identity MUKHTAR OMAR MUKHLIS If you were to ask me where I come from, I'd tell you that I'm from England, since I was born here. If you asked 'But where are you really from?', I'd say that I'm Malaysian, since my parents were born in Malaysia. I might be tempted to add that my predecessors are also from Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Thailand and Laos but, in truth, I cannot speak any Thai or Urdu or Pashto or Arabic. I speak Malay and English at home, and when I started school I spoke English with a Malaysian accent, sometimes including Malaysian slang and Malaysian constructions. When I hear myself in old videos, it feels like a completely different person. Five-year-old Mukhtar's language is very much removed from that of 16-year-old Mukhtar. Malaysian was his identifier; almost his character trait. In Year 1, I began to lose my Malaysian accent and started talking English-er. Whiter. I created a divide between the language I used at home and the language I used at school. After all, I had no use for Malay at school; English was much more important to my studies, so that is what I focused on. I thought like this for so many years that I ended up struggling to speak Malay, the language that had been so central to my identity. My exposure to languages was limited after that to sparse interactions with French at school. The unfortunate reality of language education in primary schools is that the way it is presented and practised can lead to a deep self-Westernisation at a young age. It was as if I had lost this massive part of me and was floating around trying desperately to make a purely English identity work for me. In Year 11, I started to teach languages to primary school children, along with some of my peers. We used the WoLLoW programme, designed to spark an interest in languages rather than teach a specific language in detail. It was refreshing that space had been created for class discussion which draws on individual pupils' languages and builds an understanding of a variety of cultures and beliefs, as well as languages, all while shoving hyper-Eurocentrism out the window. In one class, there was a table of kids who had been sitting next to each other for almost half a year, but it was not until our sessions that they found out they all spoke the same language: Farsi. This is one example of many that demonstrate the huge disconnect between personal linguistic identity and school, and which have opened my eyes to the need for more education of this kind. I was quite daunted when presented with the task of adapting lessons to include my own experiences and examples in Malay. But why should it be such a foreign experience to incorporate this central identifier of mine into a classroom setting? Working on these lessons has not only given the children we teach the opportunity to have their languages and cultures represented in key class discussions, but it has also allowed me to reconnect with my language and feel more confident in finding my sense of self within it again. WoLLoW has the potential to affirm and validate pupils in regard to their languages, which might otherwise be overlooked and lost in an English school setting. As the Japanese novelist Minae Mizumura said: "One's identity derives not from one's nation or blood but from the language one uses." A sense of pride Mukhtar Omar Mukhlis is an International Baccalaureate student. He taught languages while he was in Year 11 at a school in Birmingham. TL

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