The cultural dimension of language studies

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The cultural dimension of language studies

• Claire Kramsch, UC Berkeley
• Centre for Intercultural Language Studies
• U. of British Columbia, Vancouver
• 14 April 2008

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Outline

• Introduction Whats a culture?
• Historical background
• - Modernist perspectives
• Late modernist perspectives
• . Six ways of conceptualizing culture
• Implications for foreign lg. education
• The challenge bridging the social sciences and
  the humanities

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Introduction

• Whats a culture? Look it up. A group of
  micro-organisms grown in a nutrient substance
  under controlled conditions. A squirm of germs
  on a glass slide is all, a laboratory experiment
  calling itself a society. Most of us wrigglers
  make do with life on that slide we even agree to
  feel proud of that culture. Like slaves voting
  for slavery or brains for lobotomy, we kneel down
  before the god of all moronic micro-organisms and
  pray to be homogenized or killed or engineered
  we promise to obey. But if Vina and Ormus were
  bacteria too, they were a pair of bugs who
  wouldnt take life lying down. One way of
  understanding their story is to think of it as an
  account of the creation of two bespoke
  identities, tailored for the wearers by
  themselves. The rest of us get our personae off
  the peg, our religion, language, prejudices,
  demeanour, the works but Vina and Ormus insisted
  on what one might call auto-couture. And music .
  . . was the key that unlocked the door for them,
  the door to magic lands. (Rushdie The Ground
  beneath her Feet 199995)

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Historical backgroundModernist perspectives

• A humanistic concept
• A pragmatic/sociolinguistic concept
• Intercultural education

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Late modernist perspectives

• Culture has become
• - denationalized
• - deterritorialized
• - dehistoricized
• - fragmented
• - a social semiotic construction

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• Language has become
• - one of many symbolic systems
• - with variable, emergent meanings
• - a multidimensional, social semiotics
• - a contested site of symbolic power

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How is culture conceptualized in applied
linguistics?

• Applied Linguistics the theoretical and
  empirical investigation of real-world problems in
  which language is a central issue (Brumfit
  199527) . Applied Linguistics is an
  interdisciplinary endeavor that draws on six main
  fields of research.
• 1. Interactional sociolinguistics/Pragmatics
• Culture as social habitus is produced and
  reproduced through the interaction among
  individuals within a social order. Social
  conventions, etiquette, politeness,
  turns-at-talk, interactional rituals.
• (Goffman 1969, Gumperz Roberts 1975,
  Blum-Kulka, House
• Kasper 1989, Moerman 1988)

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• 2. Sociocultural theory / psycholinguistics
• Culture is viewed as socially distributed
  cognition within a given social speech community.
  Culture is the way language mediates our relation
  to the world, as participation, activity,
  collaborative task, and, ultimately, as inner
  speech.
• (Lantolf 2000, Pavlenko 2005, Wierzbicka 1994)

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• 3. Linguistic anthropology
• Culture is viewed as socialization, under-
  stood as both a process and a product. Membership
  in a speech community, with shared assumptions
  about the world and ones place in it. Culture is
  shared lifeworld, common history, subjective
  memories and language ideologies.
  (Ochs/Schieffelin 1988, Hanks 1996, Ochs 2002,
  Schieffelin, Woolard / Kroskrity 1998

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• 4. Cognitive linguistics
• Culture as cognitive structures of expectation -
  embodied prototypes or idealized cognitive
  models (ICM) of the world. Reciprocal influence
  of language and thought, language and emotion.
• Lakoff 1987, Johnson 1987, Lakoff Johnson
  1985, Fauconnier / Turner 2002, Slobin 2000

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• 5. Critical sociolinguistics/Educational
  linguistics
• Culture as symbolic power focuses on the way
  culture becomes entangled with social control,
  social identity, and dominant discourses such as
  the fetishization of communication in a
  communication culture. Imagined communities,
  heteroglossia, language memoirs.
• Culture as style focuses on the way speakers
  use the resources offered by the speech community
  to produce, reproduce or subvert the orders of
  discourse imposed on them.
• Cameron 2000, Rampton 1995, Lam 2000.
• Norton 2000, Pavlenko 2002, Duff passim,
  Norton / Toohey 2006

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• 6. Language ecology and dynamic systems theory
• Culture as dynamic semiotic system focuses
  not on stable social groups but on the
  historicity and subjectivity of social agents
  operating on multiple scales of time and space,
  who make meaning in non-linear, open-ended ways.
  Through language and other symbolic systems, they
  perform symbolic identities whose meanings emerge
  from various stylizations, ventriloquations,
  trans-lations within the layered simultaneity
  of discourse.
• (Blommaert 2005, van Lier 2002, Kramsch 2006,
  Kramsch / Whiteside in press)

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A timely experiment

• Psychology 290G Language Ecology
• at UC Berkeley (spring 2004)
• This course is part of an emerging
  interdisciplinary effort at UC Berkeley to
  explore language within its individual, societal,
  cultural, and historical frameworks. We situate
  language in contexts of individual mental
  processes as well as contexts of interaction
  between individuals in a society and between
  social groups. We approach language learning and
  language use as a non-linear, relational human
  activity, co-constructed between humans and their
  environment, contingent upon their position in
  space and history, and a site of struggle for the
  control of social power and cultural memory
  (Berkeley Language Center website)

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Language ecology in practice

• At a Vietnamese grocery in San Francisco
• 1. Juan How much panza do you want?
• 2. DF voy a comprar cinco libras de panza
  manana
• 3. Juan OK manana
• 4. DF /\ maalob.
• 5. Juan _/OK!
• 6. DF \/ Dios bo dik
• 7. Juan _/bo dik
• 8. DF _/saama
• 9. Juan _at__at_,_at__at_
• 10. _saama
• 11. DF ah

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• At a Chinese grocery in San Francisco
• DF ((TALKS TO BUTCHER IN MAYA)
• Butcher si si si
• DF ((TO CLERK)) buenas vengo lt?gt mi
  maestra
• AW ltLO HI LOgt teacher
• Clerk OH _at_
• DF ah
• es mi maestra\
• ah
• eh-nomas, este, pase a preguntar la
  masa que agarro mi
• hijo ochenta y ahora/
• Clerk si bien. le toco masa aca ahora

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• Clerk ((TO DF)) manana when you come I give you
  no espanol
• Old lady _at__at__at__at__at_
• Clerk solo English
• DF _at__at__at_
• NO, lt_at_ no _at_gt
• Clerk Jose, tomorrow when you come in I dont
  speak Spanish with you any more
• DF _at__at__at__at_
• AW no no Im not teaching him English.
• Im teaching him to read and writing in
  Spanish.
• Im not teaching him English.
• Clerk oh oh
• read and write Span-ish.
• AW yeah,
  read and write Spanish
• Clerk thats good cause he like he not even
  recognize the numbers

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• AW were going to learn to read the numbers
• ((TO DF)) dice que vamos a aprender a leer
  los
• numeros para que puedas
• DF hm
  
• Clerk thats the most important part first
• one two three four five six seven
  eight nine ten .
• AW thats right
• yeah
• where did YOU learn English?
• Clerk America
• AW oh
• Clerkmany years ago
• ltHI you know I start from beginning
• I start from one two three four
  five. HIgt
• I never know it in my life because
  my mother come
• when I come in 19 uh 80
• I still went to ESL program
• I still learn
• thats why he can too

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• Clerk learn first
• ABCD
• todo aqui
• DF ah entiendes Maya
• ano mas
• ah
• entiendes Maya
• AW a lot of people speak Maya here, huh?
• Lady yeah
• AW youre learning some Maya?
• Clerk uh not much
• Latinos is ltLO??LOgt
• DF ahi esta?
• eh en la tarde y/
• Clerk OK
• DF bueno lt?gt
• nos vemos
• Clerk OK good to see you.

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From intercultural competence to symbolic
competence

• What is symbolic competence?
• Not stable identities, but favorable subject
  positionings
• Ability to understand the cultural memories
  evoked by symbolic systems
• Capacity to perform and create alternative
  realities
• Ability to reframe the social context

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Two timely documents

• March 2007 MLA Ad Hoc Committee on Foreign
  Languages (chair M-L Pratt)
• The goal of college and university foreign
  language majors is translingual and
  transcultural competence. The idea of
  translingual and transcultural competence places
  value on the multilingual ability to operate
  between languages In the course of acquiring
  functional language abilities, students are
  taught critical language awareness,
  interpretation and translation, historical and
  political consciousness, social sensibility, and
  aesthetic perception.

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• We hope the dialogue elicited by our Report
  will help produce a focused, sustained
  collaborative effort to revitalize the study of
  languages and cultures in U.S. colleges,
  universities and community colleges. The goal of
  such a revitalization would be not simply to
  produce graduates better prepared to meet a range
  of identified national or societal needs, though
  this alone would be of significant value. Our
  goal is a higher education system that embraces
  the distinctive educational benefits of studying
  foreign languages and cultures in developing the
  powers of the intellect and the imagination, the
  ability to reflect upon ones place in the world
  with depth and complexity, and an understanding
  of the degree to which culture and society are
  created in language. (in press, my emphases)

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• However individual FL departments end up
  redesigning their programs, the goal should be to
  create coherent four-year curricula that situate
  language study in cultural, historical,
  geographical, and cross-cultural frames, that
  systematically incorporate transcultural and
  translingual reflection at every level, and
  organize the major programs around explicit,
  principled, educational goals. In the end, such
  curricula transcend a language/content division,
  for language is learned as content and content as
  language. Imaginative literature remains an
  irreplaceable source for imparting the ability to
  enter and powerfully experience unfamiliar
  worlds. (in press, my emphases)

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• March 2008 Genevieve Zarate, Danielle Levy
  Claire Kramsch (Eds.) Precis du plurilinguisme et
  du pluriculturalisme. Paris Contemporary
  Publishing International, SARL.
• The teacher trainers of tomorrow will need to
  operate in a globalized space where verbal
  exchanges will be increasingly plurilingual and
  pluricultural. Linguistic and cultural pluralism
  is more than the mere coexistence of various
  languages. It is primarily about the
  transcultural circulation of values across
  borders, the negotiation of identities, the
  inversions, even inventions of meaning, often
  concealed by a common illusion of effective
  communication . . . (my emphasis)

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Implications for FL educators

• Some of the controversies
• Teach cultural facts or cultural interpretations?
• Communicative or intercultural competence?
• Dictionary meanings or lieux de memoire?
• Native speaker norm or multicompetence?
• Talk or talk about talk?
• Grammatically correct/sociolinguistically
  appropriate sentences or symbolically competent
  utterances ?

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• If Language, as one of many symbolic systems,
• - has variable, emergent meanings
• - is a multidimensional, social semiotics
• - is a contested site of symbolic power,
• - not merely expresses, but constructs social and
  symbolic realities, then

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• we should focus on style, voice, variation
• and become teachers of meaning. Meaning is
• relational
• mediated
• multiscalar
• emergent
• historically contingent
• reflexive

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• The challenge bridging the Social Sciences and
  the Humanities
• Applied Linguistics the theoretical and
  empirical investigation of real-world problems in
  which language is a central issue (Brumfit
  199527) -
• On the horizon
• The interpretive turn in language studies, the
  stylistic turn in cultural studies.