Multilingualism, Teaching and Learning from a Critical Perspective

Meeting Halfway: Rethinking Responsibility in Multilingual Communication

Applied linguistics has historically devoted significant attention to second language speakers and their linguistic capabilities. Questions of pronunciation, fluency, comprehensibility, intelligibility, and proficiency have often been framed around what second language users lack or need to improve. Although scholars such as Canagarajah (2013) have argued that multilingual communication is a two-way street requiring effort from all interlocutors, the role of first language listeners in shaping the success or failure of multilingual interaction remains underexamined.

Addressing this gap, this presentation focuses on inequality in multilingual communication, particularly in relation to so-called native and non-native speaker interactions. Reviewing research on L2 speech perception and intelligibility (e.g., Brown, 1992; Kang & Rubin, 2009; Lippi-Green, 1994; Rubin, 1992) from a raciolinguistic perspective (Rosa & Flores, 2017), the presenter argues that perceived intelligibility and proficiency are not merely linguistic matters, but racialized, embodied, and affective ones. In other words, one’s body often “speaks” before one’s mouth opens.

Drawing on Ahmed’s (2014) notion of affective economies, the presentation examines how signs such as accent, fluency, proficiency, clarity, competence, native speaker, and intelligibility circulate with accumulated affective value. These signs stick to bodies differently, making some speakers sound authoritative, clear, intelligent, and legitimate, while making others sound deficient, excessive, foreign, opaque, disruptive, or burdensome.

The presenter argues that these affective attachments are shaped by longer histories of colonialism, nationalism, racialization, ableism, migration, institutional gatekeeping, and capitalist forms of educational entitlement.

The presentation illustrates this operation through an analysis of a student-authored letter about international teaching assistants at Penn State, showing how multilingual instructors are affectively positioned as barriers to learning, failed service providers, and sites of communicative deficiency, while student-listeners remain unmarked and entitled to evaluate.

The presentation then shifts from speaker responsibility to listener responsibility by discussing Meeting Halfway, a student-led linguistic equity project at Penn State that teaches dominant-language users strategies for communicating across difference.

The presentation concludes that multilingual equity requires transforming not only how speakers are trained to communicate, but also how listeners are taught to hear, respond, repair, and share responsibility for meaning-making.

Short bio - Merve Özçelik

Merve Özçelik is a PhD candidate in Applied Linguistics at The Pennsylvania State University. Her research focuses on language, trauma, gender, affect, and ethics.

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