RECENTLY some of the graduate students in German literary studies at the University of California, Berkeley, who also teach language in the language program, reported on projects they had been working on as research fellows of the Berkeley Language Center.1 They were applying insights from second language acquisition research to the teaching of literary texts in fourth-semester German. In their bibliographic references, the psycholinguists Michael Long, Richard Schmidt, Cathy Doughty, and Merrill Swain and the educational linguists Janet Swaffar and Sandra Savignon coexisted peacefully with the literary critics Mikhail Bakhtin, Julia Kristeva, and Wolfgang Iser and with such classics of rhetoric as those by Aristotle and Erich Auerbach. Using these readings, the research fellows easily moved among disciplinary languages. They advocated having learners of German “focus on form” (Long and Robinson) in order to “notice” (Schmidt) deictics, metaphors, and modality markers of point of view in a text by Walter Benjamin. Then, as a kind of latter-day imitatio, they had their students “recast” (Doughty and Williams) passages of Benjamin’s prose into their own style, recast their own prose into Benjamin’s style, and perform and fine-tune literary translations from and into German. They had their students, in pairs or in groups, notice the gap between their “output” and Benjamin’s “input” (Swain) and develop reading strategies (Swaffar, Arens, and Byrnes) that would ultimately help them attain communicative competence (Savignon). In the audience of this report, German literature and cultural studies faculty members sat next to Germanic linguists and foreign language methodologists, each group trying to catch on to the language of the other. Deixis and modality markers came from linguistic discourse analysis, while focus on form, noticing, recasts and input/output clearly belonged to second language acquisition (SLA) research. Imitatio, metaphor, and point of view were terms taken from literary analysis; pair and group work, reading strategies, and communicative competence from language teaching methodology.
This is the multicultural ground floor of foreign language departments, where language study is gaining in importance and respectability and holding its own in the intellectual landscape of the humanities. But can there be a common ground among such fields that have grown so far apart as literary and cultural studies (humanities), SLA research (social sciences), and foreign language methodology (education)? Can there be a common way of talking about language, literature, and culture? The interdisciplinary field of applied language studies or applied linguistics has been proposed as offering such a common ground (Kramsch, “Foreign Languages” and “SLA”).
According to a Stanford proposal for a PhD minor in applied linguistics, “applied linguistics is an interdisciplinary field which examines and explores language as it pertains to teaching, learning, translation, education and language policies.” Applied linguists are concerned with bridging the gap between the theory and the practice of language use in all aspects of everyday life where language plays a role, including foreign language classrooms. In this respect the discipline’s role is different from that of what used to be called philology, which in its narrowest conception served to bridge the textual gap between language and literature in scholarly exegesis. In foreign language departments, applied linguists not only construct SLA theories and make recommendations for pedagogical practice but also investigate the process by which students appropriate a foreign language and make it their own. How do students move from learning the textbook’s grammatical and lexical rules to developing actual fluency in communicative practice? How do they transfer stylistic or literary analysis to an understanding of their textual productions? How do they apply their knowledge of a foreign culture to an understanding of their own?
In this paper, I examine the contribution that applied linguistics can make to the way we conceive of language, literature, and culture in foreign language departments, from a social semiotic perspective.
Both literary scholars and applied linguists are engaged in developing students’ linguistic, literary, and cultural competence at all levels of the undergraduate curriculum. But whereas literary scholars or linguists research the subject matter—for example, the target language, literature, or culture—applied linguists investigate the process of transition that students experience as they apply their linguistic, literary, cultural resources to the study of another language and culture. I call these resources “social semiotic,” a term borrowed from the linguist M. A. K. Halliday, to refer to the way language functions both as expression of and as metaphor for social processes of meaning making. Besides everyday conversation, these social processes include the production and reception of literary texts as well as the reproduction and critical interpretation of cultural values, attitudes, and beliefs. Halliday writes:
By their everyday acts of meaning, people act out the social structure, affirming their own statuses and roles, and establishing and transmitting the shared systems of value and of knowledge. [. . .] This twofold function of the linguistic system ensures that, in the microencounters of everyday life where meanings are exchanged, language not only serves to facilitate and support other modes of social action that constitute its environment, but also actively creates an environment of its own, so making possible all the imaginative modes of meaning, from backyard gossip to narrative fiction and epic poetry. The context plays a part in determining what we say; and what we say plays a part in determining the context. As we learn how to mean, we learn to predict each from the other. (2, 3)
Applied linguists are interested in how nonnative speakers of a language strive to speak, write, and understand speakers, writers, and other sign makers who use a different social semiotic system. What environment of their own do they create? What “modes of social action” do they engage in that differ from their own, familiar, ones? How do students learn to predict text from context, and context from text? Halliday continues:
We have to proceed from the outside inwards, interpreting language by reference to its place in the social process. This is not the same thing as taking an isolated sentence and planting it out in some hothouse that we call a social context. It involves the difficult task of focusing attention simultaneously on the actual and the potential, interpreting both discourse and the linguistic system that lies behind it in terms of the infinitely complex network of meaning potential that is what we call the culture. (4–5)
It is from this social semiotic perspective of language as both meaning and meaning potential that I examine the teaching of language, literature, and culture.
In his 1994 book Media Texts: Authors and Readers, edited with Olivier Boyd-Barrett, the applied linguist David Graddol proposes three models of language: structuralist, social, and postmodern. I use his proposal to show how the study of language, literature, and culture in foreign language departments can be defined in three different, but interrelated, ways.
The Structuralist Model
Prevalent until the 1970s but still with us today, the structuralist model is derived from the study of ancient classical written texts; it focuses on the material substance of language, the grammatical and lexical features of the sentence that can be analyzed and taught as building blocks to communication. Meaning in this model is predominantly seen as referential, the information that is retrieved, sent, and exchanged in spoken interaction or in interaction with written texts. Communication depends on everyone’s agreeing to use words to mean the same thing, and that agreement is codified in a standard language. Meaning is transmitted by authorized texts and certified teachers in accredited schools. The authenticity of texts, which used to be guaranteed by the authority of the church, is today authorized by the imprimatur of national publishers, national academies, native nationals, and the like. Culture, in the structuralist model, is viewed, like grammar, as an overarching taxonomy or a closed system of significant differences that can be explained as a coherent whole. The student is an idealized, generic, nonnative speaker learning to abide by the grammatical and lexical rules of the standard native speaker and to understand the standard variety of the national target culture, be it culture capitalized (literary culture) or culture lowercased (a foreign way of life).
The audiolingual method, the literary explication de texte, and the culture capsule all belong to this structuralist paradigm. They require that the foreign language student acquire the ways of speaking and reading, and the facts of cultural literacy that the national institutions transmit to their educated citizens through years of socialization and schooling, whether in France, Germany, or Mexico. According to the structuralist model, literary texts are taught as representative samples of great national cultural traditions, as literary styles, and as metonymies for larger cultural patterns of thought and ways of life. Learning German is learning about German-speaking countries.
From an institutional perspective, a structuralist model of language sees the teaching of language and the teaching of literature in language departments as cut from the same national cloth, language being the transparent medium, the written, literate grammar that will give access to works of literature. According to this model, professors teaching the upper-division literature courses are often heard to say that the best way to prepare students for literature courses is to give them a knowledge of grammar and vocabulary, not an understanding of style, discourse, or a knowledge of how to interact with texts.
The Social Model
The second model, prominent since the 1970s, sees language as embedded in its social context. Linguistic form alone cannot determine meaning; rather, one has to take the social and cultural context of communication into account. This model was inspired by research done in psycho- and sociolinguistics. Social meanings might be more codified in the grammar of some languages, like Chinese or Japanese, than of others, but in general the social model acknowledges that form and meaning vary according to the setting, the situation, the intentions and purposes of the users of the language, both spoken and written. Communication in this model sees meaning arise out of the interaction between a text and its social context, which includes speakers, hearers, writers, and readers. Meaning is not transmitted, it is negotiated. Culture here is not taxonomies of national cultural features but cross-cultural understanding in the concrete situations of everyday life. Learning German is not so much learning about German-speaking countries as it is experiencing individual Germans and Americans in interaction with each other through speaking or reading.
My work in the 1980s, like that of others, reflected this communicative orientation. I too believed that the purpose of teaching a foreign language was to enable students to understand the mind-sets, attitudes, and beliefs of the typical German, to manage conversations the way typical natives do (Kramsch and Crocker), to use literary texts as an opportunity for students to express themselves and to respond as readers to the ideas contained in the texts (see, e.g., Swaffar, Arens, and Byrnes; Kramsch, Context).
From an institutional perspective, the social model of language in some respects brings together the study of language and the study of literature as cultural activities in which students learn to retrieve informational content and authorial intention from authentic texts. In other respects, however, this model exacerbates the gap between the teaching of language as cultural activity and the teaching of literature as aesthetic activity. In departments in which the teaching of literature is carried out in a postmodern approach to texts, where authors and their intentions have long since disappeared, the distance between those who teach language and those who teach literature has increased. As one of my literature colleagues quipped one day to a language instructor, “You still believe that texts have meaning, do you?”
In language classes, the social model has led to a resignifying of literature, which is read not for its aesthetic value but for its entertaining and motivating content. The specifically literary aspect of literature has disappeared from the teaching of language. In literature classes meanwhile, the linguistic aspect of literature is generally absent; literature there is taught as the locus of ideas and themes, as the testing site for various literary theories, but little attention is paid to the actual linguistic and stylistic choices made by an author. It is a common complaint that undergraduate, but also graduate, students no longer know how to do close readings (for a review of the teaching of literature in foreign language departments in the twentieth century, see Kramsch and Kramsch).
The Social Semiotic Model
Since the 1990s, the increased access to various sources of knowledge (Internet, e-mail, video, TV, oral tradition) besides the traditional literate sources and the broadening of the academic literate canon have made the teaching boundaries among language, literature, and culture more permeable and have introduced ethnic, geographic, and gender-related variation in national languages and their cultural productions.
Thus, after the heyday of the communicative approach to language teaching, which focused on helping students approximate as much as possible the national standard of the native speaker and imitate native speakers’ unreflected communicative practices, we witness a renewed interest in the complex, ecologically balanced world of the emerging bilingual language user (e.g., Cook, “Evidence” and “Going”). The postmodern trend in the humanities is paralleled by a poststructuralist trend in the social sciences. A social semiotic model of language acquisition is based on several poststructuralist principles that do not invalidate but go beyond communicative approaches to language learning.
The first principle, drawing on the work of V. N. Volosinov, Ragnar Rommetveit, and other linguists working in a phenomenological tradition (see Hanks 142–50 for a review), is that there is no such thing as language without historically situated language users or meaning makers in the local context of their communicative practices. Every word uttered or written is addressed by someone to someone about something and for someone’s benefit at a particular juncture in time. Even the invented sentences from yesteryear’s textbooks were created with some purpose in mind, if only to illustrate some currently fashionable teaching method. The communicative approach did not take profit, power, and historical contingency into consideration. Yet, as the French phenomenologist Marcel Merleau-Ponty writes, “because we are of this world we are condemned to meaning and we cannot do or say anything that does not have a name in history” (xiv; trans. mine, emphasis mine).
Because of each language user’s unique place in history, each word spoken or written bears the traces of its prior uses and of its uses in lexical collocations or co-occurrences. Thus the second principle of a social semiotic approach to language learning is intertextuality. The communicative approach still teaches dictionary meanings and sentence-based grammar. And yet, as Pierre Bourdieu says, “the all-purpose word in the dictionary [. . .] has no social existence” (39). For instance, we teach that Vater means “father,” but for a German of a certain generation the word Vater might be associated with other words, like Vaterland or Doktorvater. These terms have in turn distinct emotional and historical connotations that are different from their English equivalents, “country” or “dissertation adviser.”
The third principle of a social semiotic view of language is that language learning is a social, dialogic process of meaning construction. Whereas folk notions of language learning see it as an incremental accumulation of atomistic structures that moves the learner from word to sentence, from sentence to paragraph, and from paragraph to text, a social semiotic approach considers language as a holistic network of various signs in the environment, including gestures, silences, body postures, graphic and other visual and acoustic symbols, which shape a context of meaning and invite us to respond to it. The communicative approach has not done justice to contextual variation and change. As the biologist and anthropologist Gregory Bateson says, “contextual shaping is just another term for grammar” (18).
As social semiotic, language not only reflects and refers to reality but is itself a metaphor for reality (Halliday; Kramsch, Language). The constitutive nature of language—that is, the way language creates the social realities it seems only to express—has been remarked on by psychologists, sociologists, and linguists alike. The principle of linguistic relativity is an object of renewed interest (Gumperz and Levinson) in the light of recent research in cognitive psychology (Slobin) and anthropological linguistics (Ochs; Hanks). Language learners don’t merely mouth the foreign words we teach them, don’t put into words preexisting ideas according to some neo-Platonic scheme. Publicly known language learners like Alice Kaplan, Eva Hoffman, Andrei Makine, and Jean-Paul Sartre give eloquent testimony to the well-known fact that the words language learners utter generate ideas they never had before and awaken feelings they never experienced quite that way in their native language.
A social semiotic perspective in applied linguistics reorients the study of learners’ interlanguage (IL), or language that learners use in the course of their study, from a structural or even a communicative notion to a notion that includes linguistic, literary, and cross-cultural sensibility.
Until the 1980s, IL was seen as an evolving rule-governed system in its own right, located at various points between the native language (L1) and the target language (L2). It was seen as a purely psycholinguistic phenomenon. In the 1980s, IL research tried to explain individual differences and variable success in language learning (e.g., R. Ellis) by reference to contextual factors like the situational context (whole class, group work, outside class), knowledge domains (familiar or unfamiliar topics or areas of expertise), and discourse genres (essays, small talk, lecture) (Selinker and Douglas). IL variation also got linked to the constraints of face and impression management (Rampton). Interlanguage became seen as not only a psycholinguistic but also a sociolinguistic phenomenon.
In the 1990s, the view of IL as a single, rule-governed system was challenged by more fluid theories of learning based on chaos-complexity theory and connectionism (e.g., Larsen-Freeman; N. Ellis). IL was now seen as a dynamic, complex, nonlinear system in which forces of individual creativity and social adaptation play a crucial role in helping shape the systematically variable grammar of the language learner. In particular, IL grammar is seen as a composite of features from the speaker’s previously learned languages as well as the target language (Fuller). The combination of L1 linguistic competence plus L2 interlanguage is now seen as a “multicompetence” (Cook, “Evidence”) and not as two monolingual competences. By problematizing the notion of the monolingual native speaker and the canonical status of the standard L2, SLA research has put into question one of the major tenets of IL theory, namely, the approximation to the native speaker norm as the ideal end state of IL (Cook, “Going”). In sum, interlanguage is now seen not only as a psycho- and sociolinguistic phenomenon but also as a composite of multiple emotional memories, sensibilities, and potential identifications.
Since the late 1990s, the social semiotic aspects of IL have attracted attention as well, specifically the semiotic restructuring that goes on in IL development in a theory of mediated activity. Following Lev Vygotsky’s theory of sociocognitive development, sociocultural theory sees learners’ language based not on the acquisition of linguistic or sociolinguistic rules but on the internalization of semiotic forms and patterns used by others in meaningful activities (Lantolf). In cognitive linguistics, metaphor theory can help research the intercultural aspects of IL and understand the various ways in which learners resignify existing metaphoric schemes of thought and create new ones (Gibbs). Interlanguage is now seen as a social semiotic construct in which style, genre, and textuality all play a role in defining the mediating process of the acquisition of another semiotic code.
This more recent way of looking at interlanguage affects how we view input and communicative competence. Input has been up to now only the linguistic forms to which the learner is exposed, made comprehensible by skillful teacher talk and interactive classroom practices. In a social semiotic perspective, input is both the form and the content, indeed the form as semiotic content. Thus, for example, in the use of video to teach Quechua, I argue, with Roger Andersen, that to understand the authentic visual input provided by the video, it is not enough to teach what the interlocutors say and hear. One has to factor into the meaning of a scene how the protagonists stand in relation to one another; how their behavior enacts their attitudes and feelings; how their words match the context in which they are uttered, their past history, and their prospects for the future. In order to understand the context, students must textualize the scene, that is, remove it from its context, objectify it, and reflect on it with the social semiotic tools acquired in academia.
But, one could argue, don’t students have to learn the structures of a language before they can analyze and interpret its functions in video scenes? Of course, anyone who has learned a language knows how it feels not to be able to perform in the foreign language the sophisticated analyses one can perform in one’s own. But it is not only a question of knowing the structures of the language. One has to learn the functions at the same time.
A third-semester German class was discussing a short story by Wolf Wondratchek about the self-conscious, insecure behavior of a young female employee during a lunch break at the local café. First the instructor had students discuss the painting that served as an illustration to the story in the textbook, a 1915 portrait of a young girl by Conrad Felix Müller. When asked by the teacher why the girl looked sad, the students showed no lack of linguistic resources to offer interpretations based on a close analysis of the painting. Except for the first one (Her friend has died), most of their answers had to do with the visual topography of the painting, its patterns of colors, shapes, vectors, mise-en-scène, metaphors, for which they seemed to have ample vocabulary (T = teacher, S = student).
T. Why is she sad? (Warum ist sie traurig?)
S1. Her friend has died.
S2. Her face is a mask; she hides something.
S3. Her collar has spikes like a prison.
S4. The couch is angular like her attitude.
S5. Red means danger, catastrophe.
S6. Red is love.
S7. There are no clear boundaries between the girl and the wall. (trans. mine)
However, when they turned to the short story itself, they seemed reluctant to go beyond the referential meaning of words, the paraphrasable content. Partly in response to the teacher’s questioning, they started to psychoanalyze the young female protagonist in the story, and for this task, of course, they lacked enormous amounts of vocabulary.
T. What is a lunch break? (Was ist eine Mittagspause?) What does one do during a lunch break?
S. [from the text] Smoke . . . read a magazine . . . look at the people in the café.
T. Why does she find the word catastrophe so beautiful?
S. Because she wants men to pay attention to her?
S. She wants to be a [in English] rebel?
S. She is single? (trans. mine)
The students obviously felt compelled by the teacher’s questions to brainstorm possible causes for the character’s behavior, offering pure speculations with rising final intonation, all of which referred to a knowledge that they thought they had to find outside the text. None of the students offered the kind of analyses they had offered for the painting; for example, they could have conceivably responded something like:
T. Why does she like the word Katastrophe?
S. Because in this story nothing happens, nothing holds the sentences together, so a catastrophe could make something happen.
S. The word Katastrophe sounds exotic, different.
S. A Katastrophe would disrupt the orderly sequence of sentences in this text.
It is only when the instructor showed them that the lack of connectors between sentences might have the same meaning as the disconnected lines in the painting and that both might have something to do with the fragmented consciousness, the insecurity, of the main character that they suddenly realized that reading a literary text might be analogous to reading a painting (Kramsch, “Language”).
Students nowadays come to language classes with a multimodal literacy that makes them sensitive to patterns, parallelisms, intertextual juxtapositions, but they must be pointed in that direction. As Richard Lanham argues in his reflections on the electronic medium, the study of language has always entailed a binary oscillation between looking through language to the reality it represents and looking at the language that represents it. In the last decades, he argues, the pendulum has swung too much to a view of language as the transparent conduit for information. A social semiotic perspective on language rehabilitates looking at language as a problematic medium, something our students are well prepared to do and will increasingly need to do in the future.
Growing into bilingualism and a bicultural sensitivity is not like learning math from a more knowledgeable adult. It is not a matter of growing from baby French (French 1) to adolescent French (French 3) to full adult French (French 5), where an adult native speaker yardstick of competence is used at all stages. All stages present opportunities for various discoveries of self and of one’s multiple signifying resources, including one’s other languages and language varieties. One example suffices here.
In two intermediate-level writing classes for nonnative speakers of English, the instructor asked the students to write a four-to-five-sentence summary of a reading they had been assigned overnight, Raymond Butler’s short story “Crickets” (Kramsch, “Constructions”). The students wrote their summaries on the chalkboard, and the instructor helped them construct an interpretation of the similarities and differences among their summaries, based on their differing understandings of the story. These differences were due in part to their different life experiences. By thus validating the students’ choices as authorial choices, the instructor made the students aware of the meaning potential at their disposal and of the way in which each of their sentences created a different social and cultural context, which, in turn, constrained the ongoing creation of their texts. Through the construction of what Roz Ivanic calls “discoursal selves” (23), students acquired an awareness of the interpenetration of language, literature, and culture in the study of a foreign language.
The presence of a field like applied linguistics in a foreign language department offers both opportunities and challenges. It can put the focus on the importance of discourse, bilinguality, and the value of looking beyond the humanities to the social sciences and the sciences of education. But it also puts into question some of the traditional aspects of foreign language departments.
Centrality of Discourse as Contextual Shaping
A broad social semiotic view of language presents discourse as an inseparable part of meaning making and blurs the distinction among literature, culture, and language study, which are now seen as various aspects of the ways in which language constructs our personal, social, and cultural reality. The language in foreign language departments becomes, once again, the centerpiece or linchpin of the department.
Interest in Bilingual Writers
Given the growing linguistic and cultural hybridity of our language learners, the goal of foreign language study can no longer be merely to get to know the (monolingual) native speaker, learn about the (monocultural) target country, and read that country’s (canonical) literature—these were the modern, sometimes colonialist goals of language study. Foreign language study today should also serve to help students reflect on what it means to cross borders, to see themselves from the outside, and to have “the familiar landmarks of [their] thought” shattered through the confrontation of “the Same and the Other” (Foucault xv). A social semiotic approach to language learning makes students interested in the passage from mono- to bilingualism and in going beyond native speaker competence to multicompetence, as evinced by such multilingual writers as Christine Brooke-Rose, Jean Arceneaux, and Werner Lansburgh or by writers who write consciously in a language that is not their first—for example, French for Jacques Derrida, Spanish for Guaman Poma de Ayala (see Pratt 4), German for Elias Canetti and Gino Chiellino, English for Richard Rodriguez and Eva Hoffman.
Building Intellectual Bridges outside the Humanities
Traditionally, foreign language departments build bridges to history, political science, comparative literature, the arts, cultural studies. The presence of applied linguistics in foreign language departments should be an incentive to seek scholarly contacts also with the social sciences (anthropology, sociology, cognitive science, linguistics, educational psychology, speech and communication studies). Because it is interested in culture and voice, applied linguistics can also build bridges between academic knowledge and an understanding of how language works outside academia to construct, uphold, or subvert relations of power in the differential use of languages and language varieties.
Institutional and Pedagogical Challenges
Even though the cultural and reflexive turn in applied linguistics is consonant with the reflexive mood in the humanities, institutionalizing the field of applied linguistics as it is currently defined in foreign language departments presents some interesting challenges. For it is one thing to study a foreign language and its literature and culture on the other side of one’s national boundaries; it is quite another to make the boundary itself an object of critical scrutiny.
The social semiotic perspective offered here has educational implications. I purposely do not use the term methodological, because what I am proposing is not a methodological alternative to the already excellent language teaching methodologies on the market. Rather, it is a change in educational vision that diversifies the traditional national orientation of foreign language curricula, brings together scholars in the humanities and researchers in the social sciences, and broadens the range of authors to include all those who, having learned the language as a foreign language, have written about their experience as bilingual speakers and writers.
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