Claire Kramsch

Second Language Acquisition, Applied Linguistics, and the Teaching of Foreign Languages

Given the current popularity of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) as a research base for the teaching and learning of foreign languages in educational settings, it is appropriate to examine the relationship of SLA to other relevant areas of inquiry, such as Foreign Language Education, Foreign Language Methodology, and Applied Linguistics. This article makes the argument that Applied Linguistics, as the interdisciplinary field that mediates between the theory and the practice of language acquisition and use, is the overarching field that includes SLA and SLA-related domains of research. Applied Linguistics brings to all levels of foreign language study not only the research done in SLA proper, but also the research in Stylistics, Language Socialization, and Critical Applied Linguistics that illuminates the teaching of a foreign language as sociocultural practice, as historical practice, and as social semiotic practice.

The Symbolic Dimensions of the Intercultural.

While communicative competence is characterized by the negotiation of intended meanings in authentic contexts of language use, intercultural competence has to do with far less negotiable discourse worlds, the ‘circulation of values and identities across cultures, the inversions, even inventions of meaning, often hidden behind a common illusion of effective communication’ (Kramsch, Levy & Zarate 2008: 15). The self that is engaged in intercultural communication is a symbolic self that is constituted by symbolic systems like language as well as by systems of thought and their symbolic power. This symbolic self is the most sacred part of our personal and social identity; it demands for its well-being careful positioning, delicate facework, and the ability to frame and re-frame events. The symbolic dimension of intercultural competence calls for an approach to research and teaching that is discourse-based, historically grounded, aesthetically sensitive, and that takes into account the actual, the imagined and the virtual worlds in which we live. With the help of concrete examples from the real world and foreign language classrooms, the paper attempts to redefine the notion of third place (Kramsch 1993) as symbolic competence.

The Avatars of Literature in Language Study

This article documents the changing role that literature has played in foreign language teaching as seen through the articles published in the MLJ between 1916 and 1999. Literature has been used for the aesthetic education of the few (1910s), for the literacy of the many (1920s), for moral and vocational uplift (1930s–1940s), for ideational content (1950s), for humanistic inspiration (1960s–1970s), and for providing an ‘authentic’ experience of the target culture (1980s–1990s). At the present time, although the study and the teaching of literature are virtually absent from the MLJ, ‘literariness’ in language acquisition research is far from dead. By illuminating the pervasive presence of the literary in the teaching of foreign languages over the century, this retrospective may provide support for the current interest in voice, style, and culture in applied linguistics and help this strand of research find its way in the pages of the MLJ.

Classroom Interaction and Discourse Options

This article takes a social-theoretical view of the reality created by a foreign language in the classroom. It examines the interaction of teacher and learners in their various activities along a continuum that extends from instructional to natural discourse and is determined by the way participants present themselves to one another and negotiate turns-at-talk, topics, and repairs. Suggestions are made for broadening and diversifying the discourse options in the classroom to enrich the social context of the language learning experience.

The cultural component of language teaching

Abstract Despite the advances made by research in the spheres of the intercultural and the multicultural, language teaching is still operating on a relatively narrow conception of both language and culture. Language continues to be taught as a fixed system of formal structures and universal speech functions, a neutral conduit for the transmission of cultural knowledge. Culture is incorporated only to the extent that it reinforces and enriches, not that it puts in question, traditional boundaries of self and other. In practice, teachers teach language and culture, or culture in language, but not language as culture. The theoretical framework I propose here for teaching culture through language suspends the traditional dichotomy between the universal and the particular in language teaching. It embraces the particular, not to be consumed by it, but as a platform for dialogue and as a common struggle to realign differences.

Why should language teachers teach culture

There is an implicit and pervasive resistance among many foreign language teachers to going beyond linguistic training and the anecdotal transmission of cultural facts. This paper analyses the deep historical and social reasons for such a resistance in the educational systems of the United States, France and Ireland. It sketches the principles of a discourse‐based pedagogy that views culture as language and language as culture, and that makes the very process of enunciation the locus of cultural difference and personal choice. Such a pedagogy enables teachers to do justice to the diversity they find in the target culture and in the cultures present in their own classrooms, while remaining intrinsically and eminently ‘language’ teachers.

The Traffic in Meaning

This paper was addressed to an American audience in response to Mary Louise Pratts Una Lecture, “English-only vs. National Security: Language and contemporary geopolitics”, at the University of California, Berkeley on March 16, 2004. It makes the point that it is not enough for Americans to learn foreign languages; they must also understand that speaking a language other than English is an opportunity to see things from a different perspective. Increasing the glossodiversity of the U.S. should be accompanied by an increase in semiodiversity, that is, an opening up of language learners to the diversity of worldviews both in the U.S. and in the world today. The paper is followed by responses by Alastair Pennycook and Azirah Hashim, to which Claire Kramsch gives a brief reply.

Framing Foreign Language Education in the United States: The Case of German.

The challenge posed to foreign language (FL) education by globalization and by the multilingual multicultural speech communities it has spawned is showcased by the current crisis in the teaching of German at American colleges and universities. It is not clear why American learners of German should be learning German: for business purposes, for general education, for humanistic enrichment, or for cross-cultural communication? The debate currently going on in Germany around the concept of education or Bildung is a lens through which to understand the debates going on in American German departments and the general crisis of FL education in this country. Rather than prepare students to communicate with members of idealized homogeneous monolingual speech communities, we should frame FL education as an education in reflexivity on the indexical, subjective and historical dimensions of discourse at all levels of the curriculum.

Second language acquisition, applied linguistics and the teaching of foreign languages

Given the current popularity of second language acquisition (SLA) as a research base for the teaching and learning of foreign languages in educational settings, it is appropriate to examine the relationship of SLA to other relevant areas of inquiry, such as foreign language education, foreign language methodology, and applied linguistics. This article makes the argument that applied linguistics, as the interdisciplinary field that mediates between the theory and the practice of language acquisition and use, is the overarching field that includes SLA and SLA-related domains of research. Applied linguistics brings to all levels of foreign language study not only the research done in SLA proper, but also the research in stylistics, language socialisation, and critical applied linguistics that illuminates the teaching of a foreign language as sociocultural practice, as historical practice, and as social semiotic practice.

Multilingual, Like Franz Kafka*

Abstract This paper explores the social and cultural dimensions of individual multilingualism by focusing on a semi-autobiographical essay written in 1917 by an author who is usually read as a monolingual German writer but who was, in fact, multilingual and multicultural: Franz Kafka. The story is about an ape who, in order to survive his capture by the Hagenbeck circus, decides to become human and learn the human language. This story has been read as a parable for assimilated Jews and successful immigrants. By giving Kafka a multilingual, rather than a psychoanalytic or metaphysical reading, we can explore what literary studies can contribute to research on multilingualism and, vice versa, how multilingualism research can enrich the study of literature.