Onna Rashiku (Like a Woman): The Diary of a Language Learner in Japan. (Reviews).

By Karen Ogulnick SUNY Press, 1998.

"In every linguistic situation there is a complex interplay between gender and other social structures such as class, race, culture, age, sexuality; and nationality, and one's language consrantiy shifts according to shifting power relationships in different contexts. Viewing language acquisition from this sociocultural and political perspective gave me a way of seeing the various forces that are at play in individuals and in groups in society..." (139)

So writes Karen Ogulnick, Assistant Professor and Director of Programs of Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages and Bilingual Education at C.W. Post College of Long Island University, in her ground-breaking book, Onna Rashiku (Like a Woman): The Diary of a Language Learner in Japan. This beautifully written book--part reminiscence, part diary, and part academic exploration--carefully analyzes the dynamics of social power and their impact on language learning.

Ogulick's reflections are all the more compelling because she views her own language acquisition in Japan through the lens of both learner and teacher, yielding valuable insights for all who espouse a student-centered pedagogy. Like many other feminist writers, she displays a readiness to disclose personal stories, bravely examining the sources of her own pain, anger, frustrations, joys, and resistances arising out of her attempts to speak Japanese. Her research into her stories is fraught with implications for all teachers. She suggests, for example, that teachers might want to try to equalize power, to relax the boundaries between themselves and their students by joining with them in sharing personal experiences and uncovering power relations that create resistances. Indeed, the pedagogical lessons in Onna Rashiku are so profound that John Mayher, professor of English Education at New York University, has commented that the book "could revolutionize foreign/second language teaching."

The author's personal narrative style in relating her experiences as a language learner in Japan compellingly draws her readers into her stories. She vividiy portrays her initial acquisition of Japanese during her first trip from 1985 to 1987 when she taught English in Japanese public junior and senior high schools. One incident especially, which took place afrer she had been in Japan for only about three months and hadn't begun to try to learn the language, dramatizes the subtiety with which initial language acquisition can take place. This incident occurred when an elderly woman began talking with her on a streetcar and, though she explained she could not understand, she later realized that she had in fact understood some of what the woman said. She had been learning the language by immersion into the culture.

Ogulnick reflects that learning a language is not simply knowing rules, accumulating vocabulary, or mastering mechanics, but involves understanding cultural expectations and power relationships such as gender inequity. In a moving passage at the beginning of the book, she tells of her surprise at seeing herself on videotape and noticing how she had acquired some of the gestures of Japanese women. "Along with the verbal language," she explains, "I acquired new body language and increased awareness of levels of politeness and formality required in certain social settings. Through observations of Japanese people speaking, as well as their reactions to the way I spoke, I realized that in Japanese there are different words, tones, and parts of speech for women and men" (9). She also noticed a difference between the way she was treated as a beginner in the language and the way her male American counterparts were treated.

It was not until later visits, however, that the author began to take a closer look at the power relations she saw in Japan and to connect them to her own experiences as a woman in American culture. She writes:

Looking back, I can see that I was observing 'them' as if their situation had no relevance to mine. In my re-immersion into Japanese culture several years later, and even more so in 1993, the experience was more like looking into a mirror--not one that reflected back my exact image, but one that revealed, even where there were differences, much about the condition of being a woman in my own culture. This time by being there and being aware of how I was learning Japanese, I was also learning the many subtle and not-so-subtle ways I had been taught to speak 'like a woman my native language and culture. (10)

During her 1993 trip, when Ogulnick worked at a Japanese university and was stronger in her mastery of the language, she had an experience that taught her more about the impact of power inequities on language learning. Upon visiting a doctor, who poked her sore eye in a rough way and said to someone else in Japanese that American doctors were too delicate with patients, she found that she had trouble communicating in or even understanding Japanese in that context. She ponders:

...I felt I was being spoken to and treated a certain way precisely because I was presumed to be different from Japanese people. I was the other, one of 'them.' The women--Chihoko and the nurses--spoke to me in a way that enabled me to speak, understand, and be somewhat in control of a situation in which I already had little control, while the doctor--and only man in the office--took this capacity away. By not letting me understand or talk back, he made a frightening experience even more painful. I experienced that as a way of his using language to keep me controlled." (30)

Instead of stopping there, however, the author steps back to examine and analyze her own position in this situation:

While the process was not as visible to me in my first language and culture, there are similar assumptions about care in asymmetrical power relationships, such as those between doctors and patients, parents and children, teachers and students, men and women, which are based on the idea that the person of lower status must submit to the control of the person in higher status. (30)

Thus this researcher shows by implication that strong and sensitive teachers might try to equalize their status with learners in order to maximize conditions conducive to language acquisition.

SHIFTING POWER RELATIONS

The power relationships that Ogulnick lays bare are not simple ones, however, but complex and shifting. This attribute of power distribution can be seen in her examination of her relationship with a male tutor, Keio, who inhibited her learning by making her feel subordinate. At first she believed that Keio's maleness was the dominant determinant in their relationship, his obsession with pointing out grammatical errors preventing easy and open communication. One incident, though, made her realize that other, more complex factors were at play. This incident occurred when Keio gave an example of a vocabulary word in a sentence about a man who was acquitted for shooting a Japanese youth in Louisiana, and she realized that it wasn't her mistakes in grammar that were making him angry. Instead, it was that the "public rage of the acquittal brought to the surface a deep division between us that had been there all along" (50). With this realization, though, she began to see that "we were looking at the world not from opposite sides, but from a similar place" (50), since both occupied positions of marginalization--he as Japanese in the context of anti-Japanese bigotry in the U.S. and she as a woman.

The author's experiences with Akemi, a female tutor, confirmed her growing awareness of the importance of establishing mutuality to optimize conditions for language acquisition. With Akemi, learning came much more quickly than it had with Keio, possibly because of their shared gender role. Whereas Keio focused on correctness, Akemi was interested in meaning, gave many positive affirmations, and shared her personal stories to help her tutee learn. Sometimes both student and tutor became so engrossed in their discussion that Ogulnick would find that she forgot she was speaking in Japanese.

What is so special about Ogulnick's examination of her relationships with people such as Akemi is that she does not stop with easy answers. Instead, she takes a dialectical approach and even dons the lenses of others to achieve a fuller understanding. For example, while she notes that Akemi was a nurturer and generally helped her learn, she nevertheless warns against overuse of "motherese," which has been cited by some researchers as effective in fostering language use. Her tutor's "motherese," she says, did make her feel cared for, but also sometimes made her feel condescended to, "reduced" (55). Ogulnick also looks at her relations with Akemi through the tutor's eyes, reflecting that her own role in paying Akemi also impacted on their relationship.

Altogether, the author explains that when she experienced mutuality and felt like an insider, learning was facilitated, but when she did not, learning was inhibited. In her own words on her relationship with Akemi: "There are important implications here for language learning, in that feeling connected to another person helps to motivate a learner to want to talk to him or her; whereas, experiencing no such connection often makes communication (even among people who speak the same language) strained and difficult" (61).

This is a powerful, engrossing work that all language teachers will find both helpful to their own teaching and enjoyable. As Lynn Becker Haber of Southern Connecticut State University has said, "I was so interested in the writer's experiences that there were times when I literally could not put down the book."

SHARON SHELTON-COLANGELO is a long-time feminist and activist who teaches English at Northwest Vista College. She is the author of voices of Student Teachers: Cases from the Field, (Prentice Hall) due out in a second edition next year, and has contributed to numerous Journals, anthologies, and leftist publications. She is former president of LEARN, an organization of English and language arts practitioners.