Embed Size (px)
Citation preview
Until the 1970s: separate areas of inquiry
• The study of language was distinct from the study of both literature and anthropology.
1) Linguists and grammarians, following the path set by Saussure, studied language as a closed system of signs shared by all members of a community of ideal native Speakers.
2) Cultural anthropologists like Lévi-Strauss studied culture as a closed system of relational structures shared by homogeneous social groups in exotic primitive societies.
• Early attention on to the social context and to acculturation factors in SLA was not taken seriously among psycholinguistics.(Cartesian View)
Culture in applied linguistics through the study of language as discourse
1) Applied linguistics need to take into account the social and historical context of language in use.
2) The constraints imposed on individual language users by the forces of tradition, and ideology.
3) Culture in applied linguistics came to mean ‘membership in a discourse community that shares a common social space and history, and common imaginings’ (Kramsch 1998).
4) Culture made it necessary to study linguistic and stylistic variation, socially and historically situated discourse communities, and struggles for cultural recognition.
• Applied linguistics emerged at a time of national ideologies and ethnic consciousness.
Until the 1970s: separate areas of inquiry
• After the global spread of information technologies and global migrations1) Culture has lost much of its national moorings. 2) Culture lives in the communicative practices of
native and non-native speakers. 3) In the teaching of foreign languages, culture has
become the contextual foil of language practices in everyday life.
Discourse Analysis
• It was hailed in the 1970s as the golden road to understanding language in use.
• Culture was to be found not in artistic products, but in the meaning that speakers and listeners, gave them through the discourse of verbal exchanges.
• To understand culture, one had to understand both the universal and the culture-specific constraints on language use in discourse.
For example, how social actors initiate and end conversations, how they manage or avoid topics.
Conversation Analysis (CA)
• It emerged in the 1970s from the work of Harold Garfinkel and Erving Goffman.
• Conversation analysis has experienced spectacular growth to the point that for some it has become synonymous with discourse analysis.
• CA has been focused on the here-and-now sociological aspects of turns-at-talk, conversational sequences and the organization of repairs of conversation.
Cross-Cultural Pragmatics • It studies the realization of speech acts like requests and apologies
in different cultural contexts, and of politeness strategies. • This field studies the exchanges between interlocutors from various
cultural backgrounds, very often with unequal speaking rights. • It has helped professionals (in the legal, ….) deal with the pitfalls of
communication across cultural and national contexts. • It has helped EFL teachers design authentic communicative
activities in preparation for using language in real contexts of everyday life.
• This studies have benefited from research done in cognitive semantics, and the exploration of semantic universals. (conceptual metaphors)
Intercultural Communication (IC)
• It has become since the 1980s a broad field of research.
• It is related mostly to language education and professional language use.
• The concept of intercultural competence was defined in Europe by Byram and Zarate (1997) on the basis of research in cultural studies and cultural anthropology.
Intercultural Education
• It manifests itself differently in Europe and in the USA.
In Europe
Sprachlehr- und Lernforschung
Intercultural Learning
Sprachlehr- und Lernforschung
• It focuses on interpreting the culturally foreign Other.
• It is the work of German and Austrian scholars in educational linguistics.
• It deals with the cultural identity of language learners, cultural stereotypes and the dialectic of Self and Other.
• It considers its goals as promoting tolerance, and cross-cultural understanding.
Intercultural Learning
• The adjective ‘intercultural’ has been applied to competences, speakers, learning, pedagogy, stances.
• It is aimed:1. to facilitate practical encounters within the EU and,2. to improve cooperation across Europe.
• It has been the object of public controversy between education researchers, and linguistic discourse analysts.
• The growing heterogeneity of national cultures and the global migrations are challenging:1. simplistic dichotomies of Self and Other,2. relation of language and culture in language education.
Intercultural Education in USA
• Intercultural competence has often been associated with communication studies, and cross-cultural psychology.
• It lost the strong moral and political dimension it had in European educational circles (Byram2003).
• It was given an individualistic and instrumental dimension.
• It focuses more on participation and collaboration around common tasks for the empowerment of the individual.
The 1990s : the growth of computer technology
• It helped to mediate communication across cultures.
• It has facilitated access to the visual and verbal culture of distant others (e.g. Kramsch and Andersen 1999).
• Tele-collaboration has encouraged verbal exchanges across social and cultural contexts .
• The binary structure of the computer and its use encouraged a structuralist approach to studying language and culture based on objective phenomena.(post structuralism)
Tension between interest in Culture and Discourse
Structualist• Is language a
representation of culture?
• Teachers see in ‘culture’ something stable, predictable.
Post-structualist• Does language in
discourse actually construct what we call culture?
• The term ‘discourse’ implies a relational, variable approach to culture.
2000 to now: culture as portable historicity and subjectivity, constructed in and through discourse
• Some anthropologists are moving away from studying culture to studying historicities and subjectivities.
• The spectacular ascendancy of linguistic anthropology transformed the nature of what used to be called ‘culture’.
2000 to now: culture as portable historicity and subjectivity, constructed in and through discourse
• William Hanks (1996): Language as symbolic practice constructs the genres, identities, and subjectivities of our daily existence.
• Present utterances are mixed with prior discourses and bring about both the historical continuity and the discontinuity of culture.
Several developments have made a discourse approach to culture more desirable in recent years.
• The increased importance given to symbolic forms of power – global information networks, mass marketing has increased the gap between the realities on the ground and the discourses that give meaning to these realities.
• Economic globalization has exacerbated the clash between the discourse of a global market and the discourse of local traditions. (Coupland, 2010)
• IC has to be seen as a complex system of emergent multilingual meanings with non-linear and unpredictable outcomes.
Several developments have made a discourse approach to culture more desirable in recent years.
• Some have proposed ‘language ecology’ as a metaphor for this complexity approach to the study of language as cultural context.
• Blommaert (2005): the notion of ‘layered simultaneity’ to capture the fact that actions and events occur at any given time on various temporal and spatial scales, often causing miscommunication.
The networking culture on-line present a challenge to institutional authority and to established cultures.
• They offer an a-historical world of connections and relations.
• Virtual worlds provide imagined spaces can reconstruct actual cultures without the constraints imposed by history, biology.
• The construction of these virtual worlds is heavily dependent on:1. symbolic systems and 2.the impact of symbolic form on the emotions and beliefs of computer users.
MAIN CURRENT ISSUES
In applied linguistic research
Problems come from the applied and interdisciplinarynature of the field are:
1) Description vs. prescription,2) Description vs. prediction,3) Linguistic vs. educational concerns,4) Structuralist vs. post-structuralist
approaches ,5) who gets to frame real-world problems: the
practitioner or the researcher?
Description vs Prescription
• Applied linguistics has to do with the expectation that the findings of researchers will lead to immediate prescriptions for the practice.
• The issue of description vs. prescription lies at the core of any applied field.
• It raises questions of ethical responsibility that emerge also in the second issue, the role of culture in language tests.
Description vs. prediction
• While language tests are supposed to predict future verbal behavior in a variety of social contexts, very often their cultural content seems to want to predict cultural loyalty.
• Language tests raise:1) The thorny issue of the relation of language and
thought ,2) How much cultural knowledge gate-keepers are
entitled to require of potential immigrants to industrialized societies.
Description vs. prediction
• The problem is present in the other real-world problem which applied linguists are called upon to settle, e.g. achievement tests in educational systems.
Shohamy (2001):how language tests have been used to discriminate against ethnic groups in immigration situations.
Linguistic vs Educationa Concerns
• Why should we teach understanding and tolerance of other cultures when CLT already entails expressing, and negotiating meanings that might be very different from one culture to the other?
• The debate was a confrontation between discourse analysts and educationists in Germany around the notion of culture: culture as discourse vs. culture as moral universe.
Structuralist vs. Post-structuralist approaches
• Applied linguists are confronted with political problems in the real world where the language-culture nexus comes into play.
• There is currently some debate as to whether to consider this nexus from a structuralist or a post-structuralist perspective.
• Post-structuralist like Cameron (2000):Culture as constructed in and through discourse and emerging locally from verbal interactions in historically contingent contexts.
Structuralist vs. Post-structuralist approaches
• Post-structuralism prevents any essentialization of cultures.
• Rather than focus on the multiple, changing nature of structures in the social world, it focuses instead on the conditions of possibility of certain structures rather than others emerging at certain points in time.
Who gets to frame real-world problems: the practitioner or the researcher?
• A case in point is the current rift between second language acquisition research and research on developmental bilingualism in applied linguistics.
• In English-dominated countries, learning a FL is seen as: 1.an elite activity reserved for the few,2.Fighting for one’s rights as a bilingual.
• Foreign languages are framed in terms of foreign policy, while bilingual education and heritage languages are framed in terms of civil rights.
In applied linguistic practice
• Language teachers are typically worried that they are not qualified to teach ‘culture’.
• Language teachers don’t all agree that they should teach ‘meaning’ beyond the linguistic system.
1) Fearing of teaching stereotypes ,2) Being anxious not to politicize the language classroom,3) The democratization and popularization of culture,4) Culture fragmentation into various sub- cultures make
teachers feel inadequate to the task of knowing.
• In our days of multiple choice tests, teachers fear not being able to control the transmission of cultural knowledge, if it cannot be standardized.
• The link that applied linguistics establishes between discourse and culture invites language teachers to reflect on how their own discourse and culture have shaped their identity as individuals and as teachers.
• The notion of culture has become politicized in the economic sphere by narrow-cast marketing strategies.
• Applied linguists are concerned about the linguistic and cultural ‘hidden persuaders’.
• The role of technology in the creation of a cyber-culture :shaping both language and culture and transforming social life.
1) It has generated feelings of empowerment, 2) It has generated feelings of liberation from
cultural conventions and constraints,3) It has opened up dreams of connectivity of
an a-cultural, a-historical kind. 4) It has ushered in feelings of uncertainty and
uncontrollability.
Future Trajectory and New Debates
• The link between any given language and any given culture has become controversial.
• It is evoked by various interest groups for economic or political gain.
• Computer technology promises to do away with cultural boundaries altogether.
New Debates in Research
• Culture might slowly lose its power to explain human behavior in a multicultural world.
• In the multimedia environments of the computer, language itself may change its value and use.
• More important than a person ‘s language and culture is the historical, ideological subject positions People take.
• The debate between structuralist and post-structuralist views on language and culture is sure to continue in the future.
New Debates in Research
• Post-structuralism is a challenge for applied linguistics because it seems to blur the distinction between:
1) the social sciences, with their positivistic, objective, evidence-based methods of inquiry,
2) the human sciences with their hermeneutic, subjective interpretation-based modes of analysis.
New Debates in Practice
• Which culture to teach in a multilingual world of global communication technologies?
• In the USA, there is right now a push to de-institutionalize the teaching of foreign languages and cultures.
• There is clash between proponents of bilingual and minority education, and of foreign language education.
New Debates in Practice
• Other languages are seen as exotic variations on the common neo-liberal culture of the English-dominant world(multilingualism lite).
• In the future, the attention of applied linguists will shift from stable, national cultures to portable historicities and subjectivities that people carry in their minds as so many potential strategies for action.
Culture
Discourse
AL
