Shining My Light on Bilingualism and Fulbright

Shining My Light on Bilingualism and Fulbright
Olga Aleksandrovna Litvinova

The interviews in this book were collected in the U.S. as part of a Fulbright research project on bilingualism. The participants share their experiences of living with more than one language and different sorts of challenges and struggles coming with it. The author (English teacher, researcher, writer, traveler) also includes her own experience of life in the U.S. into the narrative as she combined elements of storytelling and academic writing.

Shining My Light on Bilingualism and Fulbright

Olga Aleksandrovna Litvinova

© Olga Aleksandrovna Litvinova, 2023

ISBN 978-5-0060-4825-6

Created with Ridero smart publishing system

Оlga Litvinova

SHINING MY LIGHT

ON BILINGUALISM AND FULBRIGHT

© Litvinova Оlga, 2023

PREFACE

December 1, 2022

Yerevan, Armenia, 2:58pm

Back in 2017 when I started my Fulbright journey in the U.S.,

I had no idea I would begin writing my first-ever book based on a part of my research project here in the Armenian capital where I have been living for almost two months now. Bilingualism is indeed such a tricky and mysterious phenomenon that you genuinely never know where in the world you would find yourself thinking (and writing) about it. Actually, Armenia is a good place for writing about bilingualism as you are exposed to it in different corners of the capital. As I am in the post-Soviet space, one of the languages I (happily) see in Yerevan’s streets making this city and country feel so emotionally and linguistically accommodating is my «language of the heart», which is Russian. There is also English, the language that I have been teaching for more than 10 years now.

I am writing this foreword here in Mirzoyan Library, a 19

century building now functioning as an art gallery and a cafe, enjoying this perfect quiet setting for doing what would definitely be my dream job. My current soundscape is multilingual as I can hear Armenian, Russian, and some English being spoken. Sitting at a vintage sewing table, I feel like a seamstress who is about to start working on putting together all the ingredients of this book. Honestly, I am terrible at sewing, but hopefully I am better with words than I am with a thread and a needle.

As much as I love putting words on paper (or rather typing them on my keyboard), I have always been too scared to even think of writing a book. I grew up as a humble kid in the post-Soviet Russia in a family that was neither noble nor rich. Probably the idea that writing was something only privileged wealthy people could afford to do was drummed into my brain at school where we were told that it took an enormous level of geniusness (matching those of great classical Russian writers) to even dare contemplate doing this.

As a kid, I also thought bilingualism was not something people like us (living in a small town not far from the Russia-Ukraine border) would ever contemplate either. Just as with writing, I used to believe bilinguals were some privileged individuals who traveled a lot and lived generally exciting lives and as some great Russian writers, mostly came from noble and rich families. Growing up listening to my parents and grandparents speaking a dialect, which was a mix of Russian and Ukrainian, I never realized my mundane linguistic experiences were at least a tiny bit similar to those of bilinguals. Now here I am – writing a book about bilingualism in my second language!

In 2017 I won the Fulbright scholarship to collect data for my PhD research project on second language writing which involved the use of a mix of quantitatitve and qualitatitve methods. The interview project that I will be presenting in this book was meant to become part of this «bigger» study. However, in the process of interviewing bilinguals and listening to their stories, I realized that «smaller» project was a lot more interesting to me. Probably that was because deep down inside I wasn’t sure I felt totally comfortable with quantitative research methods, while this qualitatitve project was a way to embrace my long-standing passion for journalism.

It really takes crises of varying scale for some ideas to materialize and for others to be put on hold. Due to some internal and external uncertainties, my «bigger» research project hasn’t materialized into a PhD paper yet. As for the «smaller» project, even in the process of working on it, I realized that I wouldn’t be able to do justice to this material presenting it in the impersonal tone of research papers. Living in Armenia amidst a political turmoil in my home country in 2022, I got inspired to make this «smaller» interview project part of my debut book.

What you are going to read is my «diplomatic» way of marrying storytelling and research. If we think about the first part of this book as a painting, all the 51 bilinguals and the summaries of those interviews I conducted with them back in the U.S. are in its foreground, while my reflections on how I met each of my «characters» (who would have been impersonal Participant 1, Participant 2, etc. in a PhD paper) as well as on my time as a Fulbrighter in the U.S. are in the background. In the second part of the book I dwell on the issues surrounding language learning and teaching and present some research studies in this area. In the third part I discuss some problems related to bilingualism which are not directly associated with language learning and teaching but are central to it as well. These are the topics concerning identity, culture, and politics.

I am perfectly aware of all the challenges of bringing a book into this world in the current situation when as a Russian, English teacher, translator, researcher, writer, and a Fulbrighter, I am really struggling with how to position myself in this rapidly changing world. On the other hand, what the insanity of the last couple of years has taught us is that life is so fragile and we never know what tomorrow brings. So, now at the age of 34 I finally have enough courage to put into a book all the ideas informed by all the research reading I have done over these years as well as those inspired by my personal experiences and interactions with like-minded individuals.

HOW TO READ THIS BOOK?

The book is organized into chapters. The first one includes the interviews with 51 bilinguals that are presented in the chronological order they were conducted in. Readers can study the summaries of the interviews in any order they wish.

The second chapter presents the analysis of the interviews as well as some studies on the topics that came up in my talks with the 51 bilinguals. The first part deals with some issues regarding language learning and teaching. The second one looks at some «non-linguistic» problems that have to be dealt with while discussing bilingualism. These are related to identity, culture, and politics.

Each of the chapters and their parts can be read separately or in any other order.

WHO IS THE BOOK FOR?

First of all, if you are reading this, you are most likely bilingual. So, I hope that this book will be interesting for bilinguals and everyone interested in language learning. I would also like to think fellow language teachers and linguists will be able to reflect on the issues I cover in the book. As they are mostly interdisciplinary, it would be amazing if fellow researchers with the background in social sciences are able to examine how closely interrelated our fields are. Last but not the least, I hope that fellow Fulbrighters (with any background) will enjoy this book and will be invited to reflect on their own experiences.

The research project presented in this book was fundedby a Fulbright grant from the United States Department of State. The opinions, findings and conclusions stated herein are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the United States Department of State.

This study has been approved by the Montclair State University Institutional Review Board, study no. FY17-18-800. Prior to participation, all the participants were informed of the purpose of the research and signed a consent form allowing the researcher to make the recordings of the interviews publicly available as well as to use the collected data in other studies.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1. INTERVIEWS WITH BILINGUALS

PART 1.1. WHO DO WE CONSIDER BILINGUAL? 11

PART 1.2. HOW WAS MY DATA COLLECTED? 14

Interview questions 14

Interviews as a research method 14

PART 1.3. MEET MY BILINGUALS!

Me and my life-long commitment to English (Olga, Russia) 20

A charming and super educated bilingual (Apoorva, India) 26

A humble and a hard-working bilingual (Masumi, Japan) 30

A level-headed bilingual full of determination to succeed

(Sharifullah, Afghanistan) 33

A European’s experience with English (Milena, Austria) 35

Inspired by a teacher (Geetanjali, India) 38

A multilingual and multicultural future psycholinguist

(Jonathan, Malaysia) 39

A Latin American with an American accent (Pedro, Paraguay) 42

A brave researcher willing to make sacrifices