Second language learning is a broader concept than foreign language learning. The term second language refers to a language that a person learns in addition to his or her first language (even if it is his or her third, fourth, etc. language). Second language acquisition refers typically to informal learning situations, for instance, Polish immigrants to the UK learning English, but can also refer to formal learning in classroom situations in any country. Foreign language learning refers to the process of learning the language indigenous to another country (not normally spoken in the country where the learner is situated) in a formal pedagogic context, for instance, German as a school subject in Ireland. The purposes of second language learning are often different from those of learning a foreign language: whereas a second language may be needed for full participation in the social, political, and economic life of the host country, a foreign language is frequently learned for the purposes of travelling abroad, communicating with native speakers, or simply because it is a required element of the formal education system. In this book, the more inclusive term second language (or L2) will be used even if most of the situations discussed in Chapters 9 and 10 refer to instructed learning contexts.
The term speech community refers to a group of people sharing characteristic patterns of a language and its “rules for the conduct and interpretation of speech” (Hymes 1974: 51). The speech community is a “social, rather than linguistic entity” (Hymes 1974: 47), thus placing emphasis on the socio-pragmatic use of speech and its creative potential for co-constructing meaning.
This artificial separation between lower and upper division seems to be specific to U.S. foreign language departments; in most European universities, for example, a unified language-and-content integrated approach is taken across the university sequence of study, due to the long period of time spent by students learning the L2 in secondary school (normally between four and eight years).
However, it should be noted here that the concepts of transculturality and interculturality have arisen from different historical and discursive formations.
The intercultural third space opens up for the subject by engaging in negotiating for meaning between languages and cultures; it is a discursive space, located in a continuum between determinations of essence and identity (cf. Section 8.2). It describes the momentary range of possibilities and options of cognitive and emotional construal in a subjective perspective, located between dominant conceptualizations, discourses, and categories. The L2 learner takes up a momentary subject position in this space which can be defined as the intercultural place. The dynamic third place functions as the momentary, yet transient and transformative foundation for his or her processes of construction on cognitive, emotional, and behavioral planes. It is characterized by a degree of dynamic in-betweenness, or inter, which belongs to neither of the languages or cultures involved, thus facilitating a genuinely new quality of construal without imperialist tendencies of one language silencing the voices of the other (cf. Section 8.2).
When I was teaching German language and culture at a Nigerian university in the 1980s, I met considerable resistance to the use of role plays or group work since students had never experienced these social learning forms before and, at least initially, considered them to be a “waste of time” (cf. Witte 1996: 55-107).
The term cultural community refers to “a body of people united in terms of a shared culture” (Parekh 2006: 154). It is closely related to the concept of speech community, and can overlap with it but both concepts are not identical; the cultural elements of a community can transcend linguistic elements, for example, in countries where many different languages are spoken, such as Papua New Guinea or Nigeria.
The term “subjectivity” refers first of all to the condition of a human being as an embodied subject; more precisely it refers to the subject’s perspectives, experiences, feelings, beliefs, memories, aspirations, and desires which, contrary to the implications of the term, are not completely “subjective” but fundamentally facilitated and shaped by the language, culture, and habits used by relevant others. The subject, however, experiences linguistically, culturally, and socially constructed “realities” and constantly produces transformative meaning by combining these with his or her subjective stance. Thus, subjectivity is characterized by the constantly ongoing parallel processes of individuation and socialization; it combines the subjective mind and subjective emotions (cf. Chapter 2).
For children, the process of growing into the conventions and norms of the community and society (socialization) typically goes hand in hand with learning the first language (lingualization) and internalizing the cultural patterns (enculturation) which guide social action. In the following, reference will only be made to the process of socialization which is understood to include the processes of lingualization and enculturation.
Of course, the L2 learner may be a member of a minority culture living in a majority culture in which case, under the pressures of coping with everyday life, he or she will already have experienced cultural difference and reflected on and challenged his or her own cognitive, behavioral, and emotional resources, as well as that of members of the majority cultures, albeit not in the scaffolded space of the zone of proximal development (cf. Section 10.2, Principle 1).
The notion of embodiment draws attention to the fact that mind and cognition (cf. Chapter 2) cannot be separated from the body because the latter contributes content to the former (in terms of structure and function of implicit and explicit activities of perception and construction [cf. Damasio 1994: 226]. For example, bodily aspects such as emotions guide us in our selection of relevant information and subsequent action). The concept of self is embodied because it relates to implicit and explicit cognitive and bodily construals of who we think and feel we are. The self is a multilayered and dynamic construct. It “emerges from direct perceptual experience and from the responses of the body external and internal stimuli” (Kramsch 2009a: 70) and is constituted in the awareness of how we react to these responses, not only in the present, but also in the past (based on experiences and memories) and in the future (related to intentions, imaginations and goals of what and how the self would like to be). Hence, the self-conceptions of self have an effect on behavior, self-esteem, levels of engagement, experience of emotions and the world more broadly, which in turn influence interpersonal relationships, society, and culture. Learning a L2 can contribute to a re-conceptualization of the self by providing culturally different symbolic systems for the construal of meaning, emotion, and behavior.
In these experiments the learners are treated, just like in the instructivist classroom, as voiceless objects; their subjectivity is not taken into consideration.
“Constructionism – the N word as opposed to the V word – shares constructivism’s connotations of learning as ‘building knowledge structures’ irrespective of the circumstances of the learning. It then adds the idea that this happens especially felicitously in a context where the learner is consciously engaged in constructing a public entity, whether it’s a sand castle on the beach or a theory of the universe” (Papert 1991: 1).
Although social constructionism has come under fire from some academics for being quite vague and therefore lacking scientific or academic validity (e.g., Hacking 2000), it still is, in my view, the best available theory for L2 acquisition, if combined with the sociocultural approach, as it emphasizes the social and cultural dimensions of constructs of the “worlds” which are open for anyone to co-construct. Socioculturalism goes beyond constructivism by emphasizing not the individual, but the radically collective and social construction of realities which is reflected in the social and cultural constitution of the subjective mind (cf. Chapters 2-4).
For a discussion of linguistic relativity in its weak and strong versions, cf. Section 3.5.
Cf. Wittgenstein’s (1953) example of pain, as discussed in Chapter 2.
Even silence in communication may be culturally charged, in that the frequency and situation of pauses, omissions, and silence can be socioculturally influenced.
Since there are many discourses and many individuals involved, meaning, then, is never fixed but always contestable.
The capitalization of the noun “Other” is borrowed from German when it means “das Andere” [the Other] in the sense of representations of the other culture in order to differentiate it from the meaning of “the other person.”
In this book, the terms subject and individual are not used synonymously. The term individual refers to a person as an isolated and embodied unit (viewed from the outside), who is identifiable from the group or community. The individual has, as a sociological and political entity, certain rights and obligations bestowed on him or her by the constitution of a state. By contrast, the term subject refers to a set of positionings (or roles) with regard to rights and duties to act within evolving discourses and storylines. These positionings are structured by dominant cultural and discursive values and internalized by the person to varying degrees, always open to constant re-negotiation. Subjectivity is not given from birth but it is the mediated by the subject (consciously or subconsciously) through symbolic forms, mainly language. Subjectivity refers to “the conscious and unconscious thoughts and emotions of the individual, her sense of herself, and ways of understanding her relation to the world” (Weedon 1997: 28); it is constantly constructed and positioned by social forces, such as the discourse, but the subject also positions his or her self in the discourse (cf. Section 4.5). The process of positioning (in the active and the passive) is constantly ongoing and takes place on the borderline between the semiotic and the symbolic: “Because of the unstable nature of the symbolic at the border with the semiotic, the subject is not only constantly made and remade, that is, a work in progress, but it constantly interrogates and problematizes itself, because in this symbolic order, the Other is the Self” (Kramsch 2009a: 96). Thus, neither the activity of positioning nor that of being positioned refers to static or essential notions of the subject, as both are highly dynamic and multi-layered and potentially conflictual, as is the subject itself. When the subject tries to account for who he or she is and how he or she became like that, the subject necessarily transforms itself and becomes different from who he or she was when setting out to reflect on the self. The self is always manufactured, structured and sedimented through the language that enables the reproduction of the self. Hence, there is not an essential self to discover but a space of living subjectivity to be socioculturally constructed.
Both the terms culture and society do not refer to monolithic and essentialist concepts, as will be discussed in Chapter 7. No culture and society (and its language) exists in isolation; they are always interrelated on many levels with other cultures, societies, and languages.
In contrast to feelings, emotions have a socially constructed component. Bodily feelings associated with being tired, or wanting to go to the bathroom, are not considered emotions because they are not embodied expressions of judgments about one’s social situation and are therefore not tied up with the moral order of a society where they have normative force (cf. Harré and Gillett 1994: 147-161).
Damasio (1994) seems to consider body and mind to be given entities which develop in a dialectically dependent manner. However, the embodied mind constructs not only the ‘reality’ but it also constructs the body (and itself) by means of socioculturally produced and sedimented symbolic signs to which it has access.
This situation can actively be sought by people who, for example, are taking psychedelics in order to find transcendental visions, or by participants of a rave, who are yearning for a world stripped of all cognitive content, so that the strength of the abstract stimulation – the beat, the music, the movement – can become the dominant feature.
The process of acquiring cultural symbols, including language, by means of testing hypotheses, receiving constructive feedback, displaying a fundamental desire to learn, and (inter-) acting in a rich learning environment could also facilitate effective second language learning which includes the sociocultural context. However, L2 learning takes place under different circumstances than L1 acquisition, and with different functions.
Vygotsky suggests that there are five stages of complex-formation; the most advanced type of complexes are “pseudoconcepts” which are situated on the borderline between the more basic form of thinking that is complexes, and proper concepts (cf. Vygotsky 1986: 113-119).
However, Vygotsky (1986: 140) stresses that the development of complexes into concepts is not a smooth and mechanistic one in which “the higher developmental stage completely supersedes the lower one.” He compares the development of an individual’s thinking with geological formations of the earth in which older and newer formations coexist: “Even after the adolescent has learned to produce concepts, he does not abandon the more elementary forms; they continue for a long time to operate, indeed to dominate, in many areas of thinking; (... ) even adults often resort to complex thinking” (Vygotsky 1986: 140).
The term “community of practice” (introduced by Lave and Wenger 1991) can be defined as “an aggregate of people who come together around mutual engagement in an endeavour. Ways of doing things, ways of talking, beliefs, values, power relations – in short, practices – emerge in the course of this mutual endeavour. As a social construct, a community of practice is different from the traditional community, primarily because it is defined simultaneously by its membership and by the practice in which that membership engages” (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 1992: 464). This dynamic and complex understanding of group practices has been influential in transcending essentializing constructs of communities.
However, fully fluent bilingual individuals can effortlessly switch between languages, although they tend to use their preferred language to mentally represent exact numbers (cf. Carruthers 2002). Bilingual subjects report feeling and acting differently when they are in different linguistic mindsets and are in a position to switch strategically between these mindsets according to the requirements of language-dependent contexts (cf. Schrauf 2002).
However, Centeno-Cortés and Jiménz-Jiménez (2004) also found that even the advanced learners gave up on the problem or produced an incorrect solution when they sustained their private speech in the L2. For successfully solving the problem, learners reverted back to their L1. This could be explained with Vygotsky’s observation that private speech focuses on meaning and does not function operationally (cf. Lantolf and Thorne 2006: 94). Another explanation could be the use of extra cognitive resources during problem solving which sidelines the L2 (compared to the L1) in private speech (cf. Winsler 2009: 23).
By orientating themselves at more knowledgeable others, like their parents or older siblings, children also orientate their form of “writing” at them so that the immediately experienced forms of cultural behavior are not only a context for their writing but it is embedded in the written forms and practices they are copying at this stage, and explicitly learn at the next stage.
In a very entertaining manner, Lynne Truss (2003) has provided many examples of how punctuation can radically change the meaning of texts. This is even evident in the title of her book Eats, shoots and leaves which, relating to the favorite food of panda bears, should read “Eats shoots and leaves.”
Universal concepts are usually derived from the human experience of living on this planet but are culture-specifically realized; the concept of death, for example, can evoke schemata of mourning but can also provoke schemata of joy, for instance, in the case of religions where death is construed as transition to a better place. In other cultures death may just be seen as a brute fact of life or as a “symbol of human weakness, a constant reminder of inadequate human mastery over nature, and accepted with such varied emotions as regret, puzzle, incomprehension and bitterness” (Parekh 2006: 121).
Other forms of mediation are sensory, auditory, visual, or olfactory. However, as Wittgenstein (1953) has demonstrated with the example of pain-behavior (cf. Chapter 2), these are typically translated into linguistic concepts to make them cognitively accessible.
Babies aged about six months clearly have better face-recognition skills than adults. They also can distinguish faces of another species, for example, monkeys. Babies who received visual training retained the ability. But those with no training lost the skill by the time they were nine months old (cf. Pascalis and Slater 2003).
When the attention of the child is drawn to something, and a person is saying a word, it is not clear how the child discriminates the stipulated object from others around it. Lund (2003: 46) illustrates this point with the example of “a cat chasing a ball across a room and a parent pointing to it and saying ‘cat’. How does the child know the word refers to the cat? It could refer to something else in the scene (e.g. the ball); it could refer to part of the cat (e.g. the tail); it could refer to a property of the cat (e.g. furriness); or it could refer to something the cat is doing (e.g. running).”
Vygotsky (1986: 98) already recognized that a concept is by no means a stable, “isolated, ossified, and changeless formation, but an active part of the intellectual process, constantly engaged in serving communication, understanding, and problem solving.”
Whereas stereotypes refer to the cognitive level, prejudices refer to the affective level of complexes people may hold with regard to other groups of people. Discrimination may be the result of both (cf. Jonas and Mast 2007: 69).
Accentuation means that similarities within a certain group are exaggerated, whereas similarities between groups are played down.
The use of small capital letters indicates that the particular wording does not as such occur in language, but it underlies conceptually all the metaphorical expressions referring to it.
A friend who teaches English as a foreign language in London told me the story of how one of his Italian students proudly used the phrase “I have a finger in every tart” to show off his perceived metaphorical competence; he did not understand the storms of laughter generated by his claim...
Humboldt mentions here the crucial difficulty of second language learning, namely that the subordination of the other linguistic structure and cultural patterns under “one’s own cosmic viewpoint” implies the annihilation of the authentic Other. This problem will be discussed in Chapters 8 and 9.
Yet some studies are ambiguous about that rejection. Anna Wierzbicka (1997: 7), for example, suggests: “Whorf’s main thesis that we ‘dissect nature along the lines laid down by our native languages’, and that ‘we cut nature up [in ways] codified in the patterns of our language’, contains a profound insight which will be recognized by anybody whose experiential horizon extends significantly beyond the boundaries of his or her native language.”
In light of this research Pinker’s claim seems a little arrogant and plainly wrong when he suggests that “there is no scientific evidence that languages dramatically shape their speakers’ ways of thinking. The idea that language shapes thinking seemed plausible when scientists were in the dark about how thinking works or even how to study it. Now that cognitive scientists know how to think about thinking, there is less of a temptation to equate it with language just because words are more palpable than thoughts” (Pinker 1994: 58).
A mental space can be defined as “a partial conceptual structure that we build up on-line in the course of communication. We set up mental spaces with the help of space-builders” (Kövecses 2006: 267), for example, adverbials of time, modal verbs, adverbs, etc.
For a definition of “language game,” cf. Section 5.1.1.
A position in discourse establishes a set of rights, duties, and obligations for the speaker, particularly with respect to the illocutionary or social force of what may be said (cf. Harré and Gillet 1994: 35). Discourse positions the subject as much as the subject positions his or her self in discourse (cf. Section 4.5). The notion of social positioning is similar to that of dramaturgical “role” but it emphasizes the dynamic and multi-layered characteristic more, and allows the subject more choice in their position within social discourse.
Whereas langue refers to the system or structure of language, parole is the realization of the system in actual speech within a given situation, at a given time, and in a given place. Saussure explains this differentiation with an analogy to the symphony in music. “Language is comparable to a symphony in that what the symphony actually is stands completely apart from how it is performed; the mistakes that musicians make in playing the symphony do not compromise this fact” (Saussure 1974: 18). Langue is like the score of a symphony, which is permanent and never-changing; parole is like the individual performances of a symphony which vary every time it is played.
By “other-languagedness,” Bakhtin does not refer to foreign languages. Rather, heteroglossia refers to the ideologies inherent in various languages and ideologies of different genres (cf. Section 4.1).
Mercer (2000:169) defines community as “a social unit — larger and looser than a family, smaller and more cohesive than a society – whose activities are based on foundations of past shared experience, common interests and language-based ways of thinking together.”
Positioning theory is preferred here to role theory because role theory is overly restrictive in its definition of prescribed and relatively stable roles in Discourse and society.
In these elaborations on blended space theory, the various techniques for building particular integration networks such as cobbling and sculpting, compression, emergent structure, and overarching goals (cf. Fauconnier and Turner 2008) are omitted because they are not immediately relevant to the argument developed in this section.
This concept will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 10.
Discourse analysis has also developed into an approach of examining the way particular Discourses (with a capital “D”) have developed, for example, the Discourse of historiography, or of social science, by focusing on the possibilities of constructions of a viable “reality,” its societal anchoring, and its historical changes. In particular, DA analyzes the formations of Discourse, as reflected in texts which are set in social and institutional contexts and in other principles of order.
However, while many aspects of identity can be chosen and negotiated, some aspects are imposed (i.e., not negotiable, for example, on the basis of language accent) or assumed (i.e. not negotiated, for instance, on the basis of middle-class, if one is comfortable with that identity) (cf. Pavlenko and Blackledge 2004: 21).
Although the concepts of self and identity are closely related, they are different in that identity is a construct which develops with the ontogenetic trajectory of the individual; therefore it is never essential, stable, or closed but always changeable and modifiable. By contrast, the psychological entity of self remains relatively stable in a subjective perspective. The embodied self “is given to each human being at birth and is to be discovered, respected and maintained” (Kramsch 2009a: 17). In order to clarify this difference, Paul Ricœur (1996) introduces the notions of idem identity (of sameness) and ipse identity (of selfhood). The difference between the two is the difference between subject and the predicative noun in the question “Who (or what) am I?” The “I” stands for ipse, and the “what” refers to the idem identity, or the character, of a person. The subject (ipse) stays basically the same, even if the character (idem) changes over time due to contextual influences.
Bourdieu (1997: 47) differentiates between embodied, objectified,, and institutionalized cultural capital. The emphasis in the present context is on embodied capital. “The accumulation of cultural capital in the embodied state, i.e., in the form of what is called culture, cultivation, Bildung, presupposes a process of embodiment, incorporation, which, insofar as it implies a labor of inculcation and assimilation, costs time, time which must be invested personally by the investor” (Bourdieu 1997: 48; emphasis in the original).
Within the concept of personal identity, one can differentiate between the notions of self-concept and self-consciousness. Whereas self-concept, or self-identity, is the total sum of one’s knowledge and understanding of one’s embodied self, self-consciousness is an awareness of one’s self. Components of the self-concept include physical, psychological, and social attributes which can be influenced by the individual’s attitudes, habits, beliefs, and ideas which can be tacit to a large extent. By contrast, self-consciousness refers to the consciously available and reflective aspects of constructs of self.
Zaimoğlu largely constructs these fictional characters, based on semi-fictional interviews.
Mead understood himself as a social behaviorist, or social psychologist. However, with his notion of the social constitution of self, mediated through language, he comes close to social constructionism.
In postmodern multicultural societies a self can be constructed in relation to a number of generalized others.
A weakness of Mead’s theory is the vagueness of the concept of the agentive I. The I cannot be objectified (except retrospectively) because it then mutates to the me. Therefore, the impulsive I is construed monologically and is not able to engage in dialogue. In addition, Mead’s concept of me is orientated too much towards the notion of a harmonious society which leaves no room for inherent conflict and asymmetries.
However, many British conservatives urged Prime Minister Cameron to exhibit exactly this “bulldog” spirit at the EU summit in December 2011 which he did by vetoing closer cooperation in the EU.
Sometimes, small children with German as the L1 tend to think that culture can be contained in a small bag, the Kulturbeutel [culture bag]. However, this misconception is caused by the German term for what is known in English as a toiletry bag.
However, Matsumoto does not provide this definition without commentary; he follows it up with an explication of each of the key aspects that are embedded in his general definition of culture (Matsumoto 2000: 24-26).
For a comprehensive overview of these approaches, cf. Duranti 1997: 23-50.
Altmayer’s approach is slightly different, cf. Section 9.5.
Like individuals, communities are also not stable and unitary entities. Although many communities claim unity, they are in fact fragile constructs, imagined units (Anderson 1991) or phantasmagoric signifiers. They present themselves as stable and coherent only by performative, ideological, and psychological effort through which differences are repressed and the Other is excluded (cf. During 2005: 32). Whereas this observation is true for most communities, it is not for cultural communities, as they do not have an essence but depend on the participation of members for maintaining and its systems of beliefs and practices. They are internally plural and contain inherent breaks and constant development of their traditions and strands of thought; hence their identity is plural and fluid.
The iconic turn, conceptualized as a response to the dominant linguistic turn, suggests that there are other important media for the storage and communication of meaning, for instance, photographs, films, maps, pictures, etc. (cf. Bachmann-Medick 2006: 329-380). Although this is certainly the case, the vast bulk of human memory and interaction does use the medium of language, including the explanation and interpretation of the visually represented figurations.
Bachmann-Medick (2006: 72) points out that the metaphor of text does not imply that text and culture have to be equated; rather, it refers to the challenge of analyzing culture in respect of its “readability” on many levels, which in turn can lead to the development of approaches for analyzing the plurality of intracultural complexities and subsets of cultures.
It is associated with the names of, among others, Derrida, Lacan, Deleuze, the later Barthes, Foucault, Kristeva, and Baudrillard.
Bourdieu chose the Latin term habitus in order to differentiate it from the term habit. Habitus is a much more complex notion than habit. Habitus is an important structuring element of the Lebenswelt.
Rogoff’s concept of “participatory appropriation” is not identical with Vygotsky’s concept of “internalization” as it “reduces development to participation and says nothing theoretically relevant about the uniquely human ability to voluntarily organize and control our biologically endowed mental capacities through the internalization of the concepts, artifacts, and activities of human culture” (Lantolf and Thorne 2006: 166).
The notion of hybridity has also to be applied to the concept of hybridity itself, as Young (1995) points out: “There is no single, or correct, concept of hybridity: it changes as it repeats, but it also repeats as it changes” (Young 1995: 27).
Young (1995: 27) critically remarks that the “old essentializing categories of cultural identity [might] have been retrospectively constructed as more fixed than they were” in order to promote the theoretical concept of hybridity more convincingly.
With this notion of contact and intersection of cultures, the concept of hybridity comes very close to that of interculturality (cf. Chapter 9).
In order to counter such fears, Gayatri C. Spivak has developed the concept of “strategic essentialism.” In her subaltern studies, she brushes the concept of hybridity against its grain as she strategically implies a consciousness of the subaltern, similar to Karl Marx’s strategic usage of the construct of class consciousness (Klassenbewusstsein), in order to achieve a change of perspective from the underdog to the subaltern as the subject of history. “It is in this spirit that I read Subaltern Studies against its grain and suggest that its own subalternity in claiming a positive subject-position for the subaltern might be reinscribed as a strategy for our times” (Spivak 1999: 217).
The term glocalization captures, according to Block (2012: 59), “the idea that the global does not merely overwhelm or swallow the local; rather, syntheses emerge from contacts between the global and the local.”
However, in hybrid spaces, processes of re-homogenization can occur. But they are not simply extensions of pre-modern traditional identities; rather, they are themselves a postmodern product which operates with corresponding means, e.g., media technology, systematization of religious beliefs, etc. (cf. Reckwitz 2007: 210).
Mall may be too optimistic with this hypothesis. Although existing prejudices may be dissolved on the basis of third spaces, there is the danger that other, qualitatively different stereotypes and prejudices can arise from this basis.
The long and intensive L2 learning process fundamentally involves the affective and psychological levels of the student in his or her advances into the other language and culture. This also has repercussions for his or her attitudes and constructs of personal identity (cf. Chapter 9).
Ian Roe (1998) provides many entertaining examples of the impossibility of translating genders from other languages into English, for example, the gender of rivers in German (der Rhein, die Elbe), or verbs in German that denote the formal (siezen) and informal (duzen) address, even when they matter a great deal because, for example, they are used in German in deliberate word play.
The impossibility of one-to-one translations may explain the popularity in Germany of bilingual editions of some French, Spanish, English, and Latin texts where the original is provided on one page, and the translation on the opposite page, thus appealing to readers with a good competence in understanding the L2 in its sociocultural context. They exist in English, too, but may not be as widespread.
These translations of texts for visual media, however, only concern the linguistic level, since the visual elements are not altered, adapted, or translated.
However, semantic primes reduce the culture-specific conceptualizations to such an extent that, although facilitating basic cross-linguistic and cross-cultural understanding of these items, they at the same time strip them of their specific cultural context and, thus, of many immanent strands of meaning.
Gadamer’s approach is classified as universal here, because he reduces the supposedly global context of tradition (Überlieferungsgeschehen) to only one which, he assumes, is universal: the occidental tradition. He believes that this is the case because “it is not by chance that the unity of history depends on the unity of Western civilization to which Western science in general and history as science, in particular, belong” (Gadamer 1975: 184).
Vygotsky (1986: 218) expresses a similar point of view when he suggests that “Thought is not merely expressed in words; it comes into existence through them. (...) Grammar precedes logic” (Vygotsky 1986: 220).
This is not an inescapable “prison of language” (Cassirer 1942, cited in Duranti 1997: 64) but merely a recognition of the fact that language provides culture-specific, relatively flexible conceptual categories.
Cf. Wittgenstein’s (1953) theory of language games which do not have super-rules across different games, as discussed in Section 5.1.1.
While the intercultural language learner may have deficits with regard to the range of L2 vocabulary, complexity of syntax, and phonetics, he or she has an advantage over the monolingual speaker with regard to being conscious of the core aspects of tacit cultural knowledge (cf. Byram 1997).
However, no direct teaching recipes will be presented here because this would, at best, only be possible with reference to particular languages and cultures and, at worst, restrict the open learning process in an undue manner.
This statement is true for the typical institutional second language mediation process. Of course, there are also specific instances where adult learners may be interested in just one aspect of the L2, for instance, for the purpose of reading academic texts such as historical sources or legal documents, which does not necessarily involve developing a communicative or intercultural competence.
An exception is the bilingual speaker who grows up with two (or more) languages. In this case, however, none of the languages involved is a foreign language to the bilingual individual.
The German verb bekommen (to get) is orthographically very close to the English verb to become, leading some German tourists in anglophone countries to order their meal in a restaurant by asking May I become a beefsteak?
In a strict sense, processes of translation start even earlier still, if one considers Jakobson’s (2000) distinction between intralingual translation (translation within the same language, which can involve rewording or paraphrase), interlingual translation (translation from one language to another), and intersemiotic translation (translation of the verbal sign by a non-verbal sign, for example, music or image). Learners will normally be familiar with intralingual and intersemiotic translation (albeit subconsciously) before they start translating between languages with cognitive effort.
U-shaped behavior is defined by Sharwood Smith and Kellerman (1989: 220, cited in Ortega 2009: 118) as “the appearance of correct, or nativelike, forms at an early stage of development which then undergoes a process of attrition, only to be reestablished at a later stage.” However, as Ortega (2009: 118) points out, the underlying representations of seemingly error-free forms are different, since accuracy in the first phase is largely coincidental but in the later stage relying on internalized linguistic knowledge.
An exception in this context is the use of pseudoconcepts which children do not yet fully understand, but use them nevertheless due to reliance of their utterance on external speech (cf. Section 2.2.2).
Cameron (2003: 268) suggests that it is necessary to distinguish between conventionalized and deliberately deployed metaphors. Conventionalized metaphors do not always have to be discussed as they may not pose a problem for conceptual understanding because they are known from the L1. If they are problematic, Cameron suggests that “they best be learnt as vocabulary” (Cameron 2003: 270).
As was shown in Section 3.1, the semantic differentiation of some concepts is not lexically available in some languages and cultures, such as in the terms mother or father which are much narrower construed in the European than in the Asian context, or the English terms coast and shore which are unavailable in German.
If one wants to express the location of the birds in the tree more precisely in German, one would use the frame Die Vögel sitzen auf dem Ast des Baumes [The birds are sitting on the branch of the tree].
For instance, in German the preposition auf [on] would imply that the children were playing on top, i.e., on the roof, of the bus.
This phrase is based on Gadamer (1960) who suggests that, in order to understand (in a hermeneutical sense), one has to “sich selbst ins Spiel bringen und aufs Spiel setzen” [bring one’s self into play and risk deep change] (Gadamer 1960: 268).
It should be noted here that the teacher is also an embodied subject with particular memories, preferences, and desires. His or her actual teaching practice is significantly influenced by experiences made as a pupil, and later as a teacher (Dann 1989: 82); these subjective theories of the individual teacher are very influential on his or her teaching process, and they are largely resistant to change.
The often-used term “more knowledgeable other” was not used as such by Vygotsky but is derived from his phrase “under adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers” (Vygotsky 1978: 86).
This definition of the ZPD seems to be very similar to Krashen’s (1985) i+1 (comprehensible input hypothesis). However, there are some marked differences, as Lantolf and Thorne (2006: 273) point out. Whereas Krashen defines the learner as autonomous, Vygotsky understands the learner’s personal ability as fundamentally co-constructed through activities with other people and artifacts in the environment. In addition, Krashen defines the learner as a passive body, whereas Vygotsky understands him or her to be a collaborative body.
A fine example of professionally displayed intercultural competence by a teacher is provided by Elizabeth, a Mexican exchange student at the University of Manitoba in Canada who, after attending a multicultural class with students of many different nationalities, cultures, and religions, writes: “Today my classmate from Kuwait is fasting because she is celebrating Ramadan; the professor was aware of that and just at the hour that her fasting ended the professor made a break so that she could eat something” (Elizabeth, cited in Ryan 2009: 63).
Coffey (2010: 52) rightly points out that this “capital is not an individual competence but a historically situated set of potentials, which are more or less sanctioned and reinforced in particular social worlds.” Cultural capital can have, as the term capital implies, an economic dimension which not only refers to the employment prospects of a person with a L2, but also to the prestige of the languages concerned.
Whereas explicit learning is characterized by directed attentiveness and awareness of the contents of what one is learning, implicit learning takes place without intention and awareness (cf. Williams 2005: 269).
The terminology of intercultural competence and intercultural sensitivity refers to basically the same phenomenon, i.e., having the abilities and skills necessary for appropriate and successful intercultural communication. Bennett and his colleagues distinguished in a later publication between knowing and doing in interculturally competent ways by defining intercultural sensitivity as “the ability to discriminate and experience relevant cultural differences” and intercultural competence as “the ability to think and act in interculturally appropriate ways” (Hammer, Bennett, and Wiseman 2003: 422; emphasis added).
In a survey of secondary and post-secondary teachers of German in the United States, 67% of the 777 respondents claimed they had “received no specific pedagogical training for the teaching of cultural awareness, understanding or competence” (Schulz and Ganz 2010: 188). In addition 30.8% of respondents “did not feel adequately prepared in teaching cultural perspectives” (Schulz and Ganz 2010: 188), and 45.6% of the 557 respondents to this question were “very or somewhat dissatisfied with the preparation they received for developing their students’ intercultural awareness, understanding and competence” (Schulz and Ganz 2010: 181). These results clearly indicate that existing teacher training courses need to be improved with regard to mediating and assessing intercultural competence, as well as providing adequate intercultural teaching/learning materials.
There are many other factors in second language and culture learning which are relevant to success, other than merely the didactics and methodology used in the L2 classroom. These are too specific to be analyzed here, but some should not go unmentioned. These factors include: age, motivation, attitudes, institutional traditions, social background, cultural distance, gender, personality, group-dynamics, quality of intake, learner types, sociocultural traditions, sociolinguistic conceptualization of time, room, individual, society, and many others.
For a discussion of literary accounts of arranged marriages see Bredella (2012: 124-140).
In rare cases of the perceived superiority of the majority culture, a critical assessment of one’s culture may be intentionally suppressed, and one’s native culture may be elevated above any cultural-relative notions. This situation is common for imperial powers; therefore, for instance, the Hungarian-born British author George Mikes pokes gentle fun at the English, including their sense of cultural superiority and British-centerdness — up to a point where an English person living in Budapest claims that Hungarians are the foreigners, not her: “’I, a foreigner? What a silly thing to say. I am English. You are the foreigner.’ [... ] ‘In Budapest, too?’ I asked her. ‘Everywhere’, she declared with determination. ‘Truth does not depend on geography. What is true in England is also true in Hungary [... ]’” (Mikes 1966: 11-12).
The term “normally” is used here because in postmodern times most societies are no longer monolingual and monocultural. However, the typical citizen remains basically monolingual in his or her acts of construal before learning a L2 in secondary school (cf. Kordes 1991; Gogolin 1994), even if he or she has contact with members of other cultures, be it in his or her homeland or on holidays abroad.
This statement is also true for many members of minority cultures living in a multicultural society with regard to their exposure to the language of the majority culture which is normally also the official language of the state. Frequently, the majority language is not actively learned before schooling, and even then there may be reluctance due to the fear of losing one’s cultural identity, which may, in turn, result in the creation of a hybrid (or creole) language such as Turkspeak (cf. Section 6.4).
The term “ignorance” seems to capture this constellation more adequately than the term “denial” of diversity which Bennett (1993: 30-34) uses for the initial stage of developing intercultural sensitivity. The term “denial” implies an active-intentional component because one can only deny what one is aware of.
The only EU member states where foreign language learning is not compulsory in state schools are Scotland and Ireland.
The concept of willingness to invest in “cultural capital” (Bourdieu 1997) is preferred to that of “motivation” because it puts emphasis on the sociocultural context which influences the degree of investment. Thus, the sociological concept of investment emphasizes the complex identities of learners and “seeks to make meaningful connections between a learner’s desire and commitment to learn a language and change their identities” (Norton and Toohey 2011: 420). By contrast, the concept of “motivation” operates with psychological categories which are located within the subject which is perceived to have a unitary and fixed personality.
As Bracher (2006: 19) points out, some African-Americans define their identity in opposition to the white majority culture. The U.S. African-American students who excel at school may be accused of being traitors to their own heritage and identity in favor of the white man’s. Thus, success in school may be seen as joining the opposition, and some students may therefore deliberately underachieve in school.
However, the social speech roles are filled with culturally different voices and adhere to a different cultural context. This may be a problem for regionally unspecific textbooks, as I experienced when teaching German in Nigeria and using a textbook that was produced in Germany. Many items mentioned in the textbook were unknown to the students, for instance, objects such as a cigarette vending machine, all sorts of fruit cake and fruit, maps, as well as the four seasons, and many other features. When, for instance, the textbook (Häussermann et al. 1983: 59-60) humorously plays with the incompatibility of consuming an apple cake (Apfelkuchen) with a ham sandwich (Schinkenbrot) in a cafe, students are at a loss to understand the nature of the incompatibility, unless it is transferred to their life-world (e.g., in terms of the West African food items eba and fufu), although this transfer evokes different cultural connotations (cf. Witte 1996: 287–288).
The term image in the wider sense refers to visually (but also haptically) perceptible objects, including paintings, drawings, sculptures, installations, architecture, films, electronically generated images, photographs, graffiti, objects of everyday use, etc.
In the subsequent principles, additional electronic media will be introduced for specific purposes.
The term “experience” refers in this context mainly to cognitive experiences made during collaborative and subjective negotiation for meaning.
An open text is (deliberately) incomplete to encourage readers to interact with the text “in ways that go way beyond simple manipulations of text language” (Cortazzi and Jin 1999: 208). Open texts invite a range of possible interpretations, elaborations, and responses. By contrast, a closed text depicts aspects of an unproblematic world that reinforces learners’ views and beliefs.
Critical incidents refer to positive or negative situations that are experienced or presented to learners in textbooks. According to Tripp (1993: 24), critical incidents are indicative of underlying trends, motives, and structures; thus they have the potential to significantly contribute to the understanding of specific cultural phenomena. Analyzing and evaluating critical incidents enables learners to reflect upon the nature of cultural differences in behavior.
Juliane House (1996) provides stimulating examples of critical incidents, derived from the direct experiences of students living in the foreign culture (in this case, American students in Germany). By contrast, critical incidents presented in textbooks are usually constructed by the authors of these books and therefore can be very artificial, decontextualized, and overloaded with meaning.
However, as Block (2007) remarks, even a year abroad as part of the undergraduate university program does not automatically engage learners in the sense of broadening their identity. As discussed in Section 9.6, this can only be achieved if learners are aware of the potential challenges and actual changes facilitated by immersion, and if they are actively and intentionally seeking to broaden their intercultural awareness.
Since its inception in 1997, Cultura has been adapted to use in secondary schools and to other languages, connecting students in the US with students in Germany, Italy, Mexico, Russia and Spain (cf. http://cultura.mit.edu/community/index/cid/1).
It would be desirable that these records of subjective development of intercultural third places were integrated more emphatically into the L2 class, thus creating a community of enquiry in order to make achieved development aware to all students and provoke discussions on different subjective tools and paths of developing intercultural competence.
This process was already alluded to in Principle 5, albeit in a more restricted manner.
Although the AIE refers to just one encounter, it can be repeated with regard to other encounters “as often as the learner wishes and would thus build up a portfolio of accounts of encounters” (Byram 2009: 224).
The terms assessment and testing are synonymous because they refer to “procedures to obtain information about student performance” (Woolfolk 2005: 504). The term evaluation, while closely related to assessment and testing, contains an element of “decision making about student performance and about appropriate teaching strategies” (Woolfolk 2005: 504) and thus transcends the data-collecting realm with regard to making judgments for improving students’ learning behaviors and achievements.
If the assessment procedure does not focus on specific elements or dimensions of intercultural competence, but rather on the construct as a whole, then a team of assessors and evaluators is required to carry out the task because “assessment of intercultural competence is too large an undertaking to be implemented by one individual” (Deardorff 2009: 483).
However, there is a version of AIE available which is designed for younger learners (up to the age of 11 years) in a school setting (cf. Council of Europe 2009b).
Research with bilingual and multilingual children has shown that they seem to prefer one of their languages for their inner speech in most thought processes (cf. Winsler 2009: 22) or that they use the languages with moderate flexibility, according to context (cf. Carruthers 2002; Centeno-Cortes and Jiménz-Jiménez 2004).
The term “writing” is used here in the broader sense of literacy, as defined in Section 10.2; it includes visual and media literacy so that “writing” also refers to other reflective activities and media such as painting, filming, collaging, etc.
However, as mentioned in Section 6.6, hybrid, dynamic, and interculturally-based concepts of identity have the potential to undermine simplistic narratives of citizenship operating with monolithic national identities, thus undermining simplifying concepts of patriotism and nationalism which view the identification with other languages and their inherent cultural frames of mind with skepticism. On the other hand, some minority communities might deliberately keep some of their native linguistic and cultural features in order to preserve their distinct social identity (cf. Section 6.4).
In the wake of the recent rise of radical nationalist attitudes (and parties, such as the British National Party, the French Front National, the Hungarian Jobbik Party, or the German National Democratic Party) across Europe, however, one might be directly confronted by these simplistic, yet apparently forceful constructs when trying to resist (or promote) them in the context of their violent manifestations.
On the basis of these clearly positive traits, the title of Hoffman’s (1989) book “Lost in Translation” seems very negative; from this perspective the phrase “Gained in Translation” (Shields 2000) might have more appropriately captured the enriching and transformative effects of her immersion in the anglophone linguistic, social, and cultural environment.
In German, the term Spiel refers to both game and play.