Language and Culture

Reflective Narratives and the Emergence of Identity

David Nunan, Julie Choi, David Nunan, Julie Choi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781135153908
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This state-of-the-art exploration of language, culture, and identity is orchestrated through prominent scholars' and teachers' narratives, each weaving together three elements: a personal account based on one or more memorable or critical incidents that occurred in the course of learning or using a second or foreign language; an interpretation of the incidents highlighting their impact in terms of culture, identity, and language; the connections between the experiences and observations of the author and existing literature on language, culture and identity.

What makes this book stand out is the way in which authors meld traditional 'academic' approaches to inquiry with their own personalized voices. This opens a window on different ways of viewing and doing research in Applied Linguistics and TESOL. What gives the book its power is the compelling nature of the narratives themselves. Telling stories is a fundamental way of representing and making sense of the human condition. These stories unpack, in an accessible but rigorous fashion, complex socio-cultural constructs of culture, identity, the self and other, and reflexivity, and offer a way into these constructs for teachers, teachers in preparation and neophyte researchers. Contributors from around the world give the book broad and international appeal.

Chapter 1
Language, Culture, and Identity

Framing the Issues

David Nunan
University of Hong Kong
Julie Choi
University of Technology, Sydney

Like many similar works, this collection began as a conversation. Well, to be honest, it was more an argument than a conversation. One night over drinks we began discussing new directions in research methodology. Julie had sent David a copy of Carolyn Ellis’s “Final Negotiation,” a compelling account of her life with a partner with a terminal disease. David, somewhat provocatively, asked, “Well, it’s a wonderfully-written, moving account, but is it research?”

The ensuing “conversation” opened up a raft of questions and dilemmas. Many of these are well rehearsed in the literature on research methodology (see for example, Nunan & Bailey, 2009; van Lier, 1988, 1990). Questions we debated and discussed included:

What counts as legitimate data? Is meeting threats to reliability and validity a precondition for inquiry to count as “research?” Does the manner in which research is presented qualify or disqualify it as research? What is “academic” writing? Where is the boundary between fact and fiction? Are accounts based on introspection research or self-indulgence? These were all issues that came up time and again as we shaped the volume and began to solicit contributions to it.

When we issued invitations for contributions to this volume, we asked authors to include in their chapters three elements: a brief language learning history; one or two narrative events or critical incidents that occurred while learning or using language and that highlighted either some aspect of culture, identity, or language, or the interconnections between some or all of these constructs; and a commentary on the narratives. We were happy for contributors to either present the background, narratives and commentary separately, or to weave these elements together. For us, the resulting pieces can be characterized as “research.”

Very early in the development of the collection we came head-to-head with the issue of academic style and personal voice. One reviewer of our initial proposal argued that the work needed to be “more academic.” Another reviewer suggested we keep all of the narratives and commentaries separate. A colleague asked, “Aren’t you freaking out about the use of ‘I’ in your research?”

The process of writing opens up questions and brings the writer face-to-face with the purpose and intention of the act of recording and interpreting narrative accounts. We and our co-authors set off in one direction and more often than not found ourselves in some place else. The act of writing thus became part of the act of inquiry. It became clear to us that how the story is told is as integral to the final product as what the story is about. The author’s voice thus became an important motif in the evolution of the book. As we have noted elsewhere:

By “voice” we are referring to the centrality of the human story to qualitative research in terms of what the story is and how the story is told. Stories touch the human heart as well as the mind. From time immemorial they have provided a vehicle for entertainment, but, more importantly in pre- and non-literature societies, for passing cultural knowledge from one generation to the next. In taking this stance, we believe that research methodology has to do with not just how the research is conceptualized and conducted, but how it is represented. We are aware of the ambiguity in the term “represent”; that it can be taken two ways—“to stand for” and “to re-present.”

(Nunan & Choi, forthcoming)

Whether we are monolinguals or multilinguals, experts or novices, we all come across and struggle with issues of how language and culture affect or influence our identity. (We note that the current literature identifies bi/multilinguals, not necessarily as someone with high levels of proficiency in two or more languages, but someone who functions in more than one language for purposes of communication. The term “plurilingualism” is also gaining currency to describe such individuals, whose numbers are on the increase with globalization and the international flow of peoples around the world.)

Micro Level Analysis as a Point of Departure

Initially we envisaged this as a “fun” project. We thought that producing a self report, then reflecting on it, analyzing it, and connecting it to the literature, if not easy, would not necessarily be difficult. How wrong we were! Many contributors, having embarked on the process, came back to us with comments on just how hard it was. Several had to confront the dilemma of self-disclosure, something they had never had to do in their regular academic writing. Others struggled with questions of whether the personal stories and their interpretations made sense, if the accounts were rigorous enough or would resonate with readers. One who was caught between two cultures told us that through the writing of her piece she finally knew where it was that she wanted to be buried. Most of our contributors sent their pieces to colleagues and personal acquaintances asking for guidance and feedback. Some also experimented with their stories in writing groups before they submitted a co-constructed final chapter. Most, if not all of the chapters, are thus a product of intertextuality, although ultimately individual authors made the final decision of what their stories meant to them. They were creating their own “truths.” (This struggle to capture experienced “truths” in words reflects issues of voice and professionalism in Casanave and Schecter’s 1997 edited collection.)

Despite all of the questions of what is or isn’t academically acceptable, perhaps the chapters here are models for what senior and junior academics see as academically acceptable in terms of using personal narratives and theories for research purposes. Concepts of collaboration, reflexivity, personal narratives, storytelling, autoethnography, and writing life histories have been around for several decades but when they all come together and are examined in 5,000 words or less, a new genre emerges.

In addition to applied linguists, we invited contributions from writers in other fields: a well-known journalist and novelist, members of communications departments, etc. By looking outwards, we discovered that the conversations that we had begun having, and the questions and issues we were facing, were being confronted by individuals and groups from many different scholarly communities all over the world.

Defining and Differentiating Key Constructs

As the title suggests, the central constructs providing a scaffolding for the volume are language, culture, and identity. Another central concept is that of reflexivity. Many articles, and indeed whole books have grappled with the challenge of defining these constructs, and collectively, there are literally hundreds of definitions.

The three characterizations of “culture” we like are those by Kramsch (1998), Judd (2002), and Pennycook (1995). Judd (2002:10) suggests that “[c]ulture can be defined as the system of shared objects, activities and beliefs of a given group of people.” Kramsch (1998:127) also emphasizes the notion of shared practice, suggesting that culture is “the membership in a discourse community that shares a common social space and history, and a common system of standards for perceiving, believing, evaluating, and acting.” The contributions to this volume bear out the reality that as individuals we belong simultaneously to multiple cultures and sub-cultures. Pennycook sees culture “as the process by which people make sense of their lives, a process always involved in struggles over meaning and representation” (Pennycook, 1995: 47). Again, the reference to personal struggle within a larger social context resonates with numerous contributions to the collection.

“Identity is about belonging, about what you have in common with some people and what differentiates you from others” (Weeks, 1990: 88). Identity is therefore recognition of cultural belonging, which is internal to the individual, while culture is external. Identity is no longer seen as a unitary or ever stable construct. As Norton (forthcoming) has noted, and as our contributors attest in their narratives,

[e]very time we speak, we are negotiating and renegotiating our sense of self in relation to the larger social world, and reorganizing that relationship across time and space. Our gender, race, class, ethnicity, sexual orientations, among other characteristics, are all implicated in this negotiation of identity.

(p.2)

Such negotiation is interwoven with power, politics, ideologies and “interlocutors’ views of their own and others’ identities” (Pavlenko & Blackledge, 2004:1).

The metamorphic nature of the construct has become ever more apparent with globalization and the emergence of a globalized citizenry. We are witnessing the emergence of a more dynamic type of identity formation that confronts people with hybridized or cosmopolitan identities in the twenty-first century. As Delanty (2003:133) states,

[s]trangeness has become more central to the self today, both in terms of a strangeness within the self and in the relationship between self and other. This experience of strangeness captures the essence of the postmodern sensibility, namely the feeling of insecurity, contingency and uncertainty both in the world and in the identity of the self.

In this current view of identity

the capacity for autonomy is no longer held in check by rigid structures, such as class, gender, nation, ethnicity. The self can be invented in many ways. The contemporary understanding of the self is that of a social self formed in relations of difference rather than of unity and coherence.

(p. 135)

In the narratives that follow, you will see this theme being played out time and time again.

Language is another construct that has resulted in hundreds, if not thousands of book-length treatments. (See for example, Nunan, 2007.) Kramsch argues that:

Language is only one of many semiotic systems with which learners make sense of the world expressed in a different language. The acquisition of another language is not an act of disembodied cognition, but is the situated, spatially and temporally anchored, co-construction of meaning between teachers and learners who each carry with them their own history of experience with language and communication. Culture is not one worldview, shared by all the members of a national speech community; it is multifarious, changing, and, more often than not, conflictual.

(Kramsch, 2004: 255)

Each of the contributions to this collection represents an exercise in reflexivity, reflexivity being “… the process of continually reflecting upon our interpretations of both our experience and the phenomena being studied so as to move beyond the partiality of our previous understandings and our investment in particular research outcomes” (Finlay, 2003:108). They also bear out Finlay’s contention that

When we narrate our experience (be it in an interview or when providing a reflexive account) we offer one version—an interpretation—which seems to work for that moment. Like an external observer, we have to reflect on the evidence and recognise the indexicality and non-conclusive nature of any of our understandings. “All reflection is situational … always subject to revision.”

(McCleary cited in Finlay, 2003: 110)

The pieces in this collection weave together learning histories, personal narratives, and theory. The words “theory” and “theorizing” get tossed around rather loosely in the literature. The following statement from Julian Edge, one of our contributors, comes closest to capturing our sense of the term and reflects what our contributors have done in situating their narratives within the research genres that intersect with the concerns, issues, and perspectives that emerge from the narratives.

… what I mean by theory is an articulation of the best understanding thus far available to investigators as to why things are the way they are. This kind of formulation can exist at the level of a Nobel Prize winner, and at the level of a novice teacher. One tries to make a statement that accounts for the data as one understands them.

(Edge, 2008: 653)

As we attempted to define key constructs, we came to question their separability. In other words, we became reflexive about our own area of inquiry. To what extent is it possible to separate culture and identity, language and culture, language and identity? In many texts, one is defined in terms of the other. Our own stance is that culture is an “outside the individual” construct, while identity is an “inside the individual” construct. Culture, as we have said, has to do with the artifacts, ways of doing, etc. shared by a group of people. Identity is the acceptance and internalization of the artifacts and ways of doing by a member of that group.

While reading and reviewing the contributions to the volume, we also came face-to-face with the “identity paradox.” We all have multiple identities, and these can weld us together into cultures and subcultures separated by existential chasms. However, if we look beyond these chasms, we are all part of the human race, with similar aspirations and ideals.

In casual conversations with friends, colleagues, and even strangers, we found that “culture” and “identity” are pervasive but invisible until they are pointed out. Just as a fish is unaware of water until it is pulled from the ocean, the river or the stream, so most people are unaware of their culture or identity until they are confronted with other cultures and identities.

The Sapir-Whorf...

Table of contents

• ESL & Applied Linguistics Professional Series
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1 Language, Culture, and Identity
• Chapter 2 Coat Hangers, Cowboys, and Communication Strategies
• Chapter 3 Speaking Romance-esque
• Chapter 4 Collaborating on Community, Sharing Experience, Troubling the Symbolic
• Chapter 5 Achieving Community
• Chapter 6 Another Drink in Subanun1
• Chapter 7 Nonghao, I am a Shanghai Noenoe
• Chapter 8 Living on the Hyphen
• Chapter 9 Negotiating Multiple Language Identities
• Chapter 10 Minna no Nihongo? Nai!
• Chapter 11 Elaborating the Monolingual Deficit
• Chapter 12 The Foreign-ness of Native Speaking Teachers of Colour
• Chapter 13 Otra Estación – A First Spanish Lesson
• Chapter 14 Bewitched
• Chapter 15 Am I that Name?
• Chapter 16 English and Me
• Chapter 17 Adaptive Cultural Transformation
• Chapter 18 On this Writing
• Chapter 19 The Festival Incident
• Chapter 20 Changing Identities in Japanese–English Bicultural Names
• Chapter 21 Berlin Babylon
• Chapter 22 Changing Stripes – Chameleon or Tiger?
• Chapter 23 Vanishing Acts
• Chapter 24 Dog Rice and Cultural Dissonance
• Chapter 25 ‘Where Am I From’
• Chapter 26 Sweating Cheese and Thinking Otherwise
• Chapter 27 Multilingual Couple Talk
• Chapter 28 Transforming Identities In and Through Narrative
• Chapter 29 A Short Course in Globalese
• Afterword
• Index