The Critical Turn in Language and Intercultural Communication Pedagogy

Theory, Research and Practice

Maria Dasli, Adriana Raquel Díaz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317357674
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Research in Education

This edited research volume explores the development of what can be described as the 'critical turn' in intercultural communication pedagogy, with a particular focus on modern/foreign language education. The main aim is to trace the realisations of this critical turn against a background of unequal power relations, and to illuminate the role that radical culture educators can play in the making of a more democratic and egalitarian social order.

The volume takes as a starting point the idea that criticality draws on a number of intellectual traditions, which do not always focus on social and political critique, and argues that because ideological hegemony impacts on the meanings that people create and share, intercultural communication pedagogy ought to locate itself within wider socio-political contexts. With reference points drawn from critical and transnational social theory, critical pedagogy and intercultural theory, contributors to this volume provide readers with powerful ways that show how this can be achieved, and together assess the impact that their understanding of criticality can make on modern/foreign language education.

The volume is divided into three major parts, namely: 'theorising critically', 'researching critically' and 'teaching critically'.

Part I
Theorising Critically

1
Tracing the ‘Critical’ Trajectory of Language and Intercultural Communication Pedagogy

Adriana Raquel Díaz and Maria Dasli

Introduction

‘Language education’ and ‘intercultural communication’ both deal with human interaction. But only recently have systematic links been drawn in ways that enable these fields to complement each other in terms of the key concepts, theories and research methods they share. Moreover, until relatively recently, those involved in language education downplayed the significance of its ‘(inter)cultural’ dimension, while those in intercultural communication did similarly with this field’s ‘linguistic’ dimension.¹ Academic publications have gradually built bridges that are now narrowing the theoretical and empirical gaps between the two fields. These include The Sage Handbook of Intercultural Competence (Deardorff, 2009) and The Routledge Handbook of Language and Intercultural Communication (Jackson, 2012), along with the series, Routledge Studies in Language and Intercultural Communication² (edited by Zhu Hua and Claire Kramsch), and the journal, Language and Intercultural Communication.³

Beyond theoretical and empirical commonalities, the merging of education on ‘language’ and on ‘intercultural communication’ through a focus on ‘pedagogy’ (teaching and learning) is perhaps even more recent. The literature on pedagogical approaches to the acquisition of ‘intercultural (communicative) competence’ and development of the ‘intercultural speaker’ through modern foreign languages (MFL) education, along with primers and textbooks focused on the role of language in intercultural communication, provide ample evidence of an increasingly established body of scholarship.⁴ All of these developments attest to the burgeoning status of ‘language and intercultural communication pedagogy’ as a field in its own right.

In this chapter we explore key scholarly works that have helped to shape and advance this evolving field through informing, inspiring and challenging readers and helping to establish a new, inclusive paradigm for ‘language and intercultural communication’. This work appears to be ever more driven by a critical pedagogical approach to the study of culture, constructively exploring the power-bound dynamics of human interaction as a ‘political project’ (Hall, 1996). This approach, we argue, not only takes the field beyond the problematic notion of essentialism, but also helps to enable the transformation of society into a more egalitarian form in contexts where relations of power and privilege subvert some or even vast swathes of people through an intrinsic process of othering (Said, 1978). However, acknowledging that critical pedagogy can become as hegemonic as the discourses it aims to subvert, we conclude this chapter with discussion of both the repressive potential of a critical pedagogical framework and ethically responsible engagement with criticality, as a potential way out of the increasingly evident aporetic paralysis that this field is currently facing.

Convergence Through Pedagogy

Pedagogical approaches to ‘culture’ in language teaching have a long tradition, deeply influenced by evolving “conceptualisations of the relationship between language and culture and thereby also of the relationship between language teaching and culture teaching” (Risager, 2007, p. 160). In the last few decades, these evolving conceptualisations have started to weave connections between ‘language teaching’ and ‘intercultural communication,’ with a focus on learning and teaching. Indeed, ‘language and intercultural communication pedagogy’ as an area of study began to take shape more prominently in Europe through the rapid changes under way in MFL education in the late 1980s and 1990s. These changes were triggered by two complementary forces. One was strong impetus to address the cultural dimension of language teaching (Byram, 1988, 1989; Byram & Esarte-Sarries, 1990) to acknowledge the sociocultural and sociolinguistic aspects of communication. The other was a shift from so-called essentialist views, rooted in the belief that people and/or phenomena have an underlying and unchanging ‘essence’, to non-essentialist views on culture in communication. The persuasive capacity of these combined forces helped to deepen and shift understanding about both language teaching and communication as processes evidencing the dynamic nature of speakers’ identities in the course of interaction.

Risager’s work (2007, 2011) provides the most comprehensive historical analysis of language and (inter)cultural pedagogy across continents (Europe, North America and Australia) and the streams of disciplines influencing development of this pedagogy (linguistics, humanities and social sciences). From this research, it can be argued that it was the deliberate and concerted efforts to problematise the cultural dimension of ‘language education’, undertaken in Europe in the late 1980s and 1990s, that led to questioning the ultimate goal of language learning. Hitherto understanding of this cultural dimension had been defined by the dominant model of the ‘native speaker’ and pedagogically driven by understanding of the learner’s need to acquire communicative competence (CC) (Hymes, 1972). This largely simplified and ultimately unattainable goal was itself a product of the power-bound dynamics of human interaction as a ‘political project’, deriving from European contexts. It presupposed that learning a language involves becoming like a person from another country—both ‘linguistically’, and to a large extent, ‘culturally’. Conversely, Byram (1997) argued that a model of competence with the native speaker’s linguistic and sociocultural competences as its goal:

[…] would create the wrong kind of competence. It would imply that the learner should be linguistically schizophrenic, abandoning one language in order to blend into another linguistic environment, becoming accepted as a native speaker by other native speakers. This linguistic schizophrenia also suggests separation from one’s own culture and the acquisition of a native sociocultural competence, and a new sociocultural identity.

(pp. 11–12)

Kramsch (1998a) echoed this concern and noted further:

In the grey zones which constitute our multilingual, multicultural societies to an increasing extent, the difference between native speakers–non-native speakers loses its meaning. Both native speakers and non-native speakers can belong to various language groupings, of which they are more or less recognised members.

(p. 30)

With language education no longer defined primarily in terms of the acquisition of CC, the focus of this field was shifted to development of intercultural communicative competence (ICC) (Byram, 1997; Byram & Zarate, 1994). This competence model attempted to operationalise the place of sociocultural knowledge in the development of learners’ linguistic proficiency. As such, ICC is conceived as comprising four sub-competences, three of which were included in previous models of CC: linguistic, sociolinguistic and discourse competences (Canale, 1983; Canale & Swain, 1980; Hymes, 1972; Savignon, 1983), and, as a new element: intercultural competence (IC). IC is conceived as encompassing a set of practices that can be grouped under three dimensions: cognitive (knowledge), behavioural (skills) and affective (attitudes). Byram and Zarate (1994) explained these dimensions using the French term savoir, which can be translated as ‘knowing’. They identified four savoirs:

1. The first, savoirs or ‘knowings’, represents the knowledge of self and other/s in interaction, both individual and societal.
2. The second, savoir comprendre, or ‘knowing how to understand’, concerns the skills for interpreting and relating information in documents and other sources of information from one’s own and others’ cultures.
3. The third, savoir apprendre/faire or ‘knowing how to learn/to do’, concerns the skills for discovering new knowledge and for interacting to gain new insights about cultural practices, as well as the ability to apply these under the constraints of real-time communication and interaction.
4. The fourth, savoir être or ‘knowing how to be’, concerns the attitudes involved in relativising the self and valuing the other (curiosity and openness, readiness to suspend disbelief about other cultures and belief about one’s own).

Byram (1997) later added a fifth component, savoir s’engager or ‘knowing how to commit oneself’, which concerns the development of ‘critical cultural awareness’ through political education. Byram compared this last component to the purposes of politische Bildung in the (West) German education tradition, in which, in addition to being able to communicate effectively across languages, the goal is to encourage “learners to reflect critically on the values, beliefs and behaviours of their own society” (Byram, 2009, p. 321) and thus become “interculturally competent speakers” (Sercu, 2005, p. 2). Byram (2009) claimed that he coined the phrase ‘intercultural speaker’ within the context of foreign language pedagogy in his working paper published with Zarate in 1994. Indeed, their paper and Byram’s subsequent development of the ICC model do not use the native speaker as a point of reference. Instead they focus on the inter cultural aspects of communication, emphasising learners’ mediation between and transcendence of (linguistic and cultural) diversity.

In this context, theories of ‘thirdness’ came into play to reconceptualise learners’ negotiation between the various languages and cultures or langua-cultures (Risager, 2005, 2006a) in interaction. Theories of thirdness challenged binary opposites such as the ‘here and there’; ‘self and other’ and so forth. In the field of MFL education, Claire Kramsch (1993, 1998a, 1998b) engaged with these theories and put forward the notion of a ‘third place’ as a metaphorical space for the dialogue and negotiation between learners’ ‘native’ and ‘target’ cultures. As we discuss in later sections, Kramsch (2006, 2009) revisited this notion in “an admirable self-critique” (Zhu, 2014, p. 154).

Overall, this shift from the native mastery of the target language to the notion of learning to become an ‘intercultural’ speaker did not mean that the requirements imposed hitherto on the learner to acquire a native-like linguistic competence disappeared completely. Rather, the goal became being able to move easily and appropriately between discourse communities across languages and cultures (Byram, 1997). As such, the concept of ICC, now widely spread in the field of foreign language education, signalled a landmark shift in the way language education approached the integration of an (inter)cultural dimension.

Within this growing body of research, however, we can see that ways in which the discipline has operated have been determined largely by the struggle between two opposing views of the social world and of language and culture in communication. The first is derived largely from the so-called essentialist view of the social world in which culture is abstracted from the discursive context of interaction and instead consists of fixed traits that are spread evenly among members of a particular (often national) group (Holliday, 1999). Thus, in equating culture with country, the essentialist view treats the social world as a collection of mutually exclusive entities that determine what one can or cannot do in given situations. One often-cited model that represents this view has been offered by Geert Hofstede (1984, 1991, 2001) and his followers (e.g., Trompenaars & Hampden-Turner, 2004), who define culture as:

The collective programming of the mind that distinguishes the members of one group or category of people from another […] The ‘mind’ stands for the head, heart and hands—that is, for thinking, feeling, and acting, with consequences for beliefs, attitudes, and skills […] Culture in this sense includes values; systems of values are a core element of culture.

(Hofstede, 2001, pp. 9–10)

The essence of this definition suggests that culture consists of a coherent set of fundamental values that members of a given group acquire from their elders during the process of socialisation. As this process takes place in particular sociocultural and linguistic environments (Fortman & Giles, 2006), it gradually habituates individuals to certain ways of ‘thinking’, ‘feeling’ and ‘acting’ so that they possess a basic belief system. This belief system, in turn, determines the character or nature of individual group members “as if they were mindless cogs in an elaborate machine” (Fay, 1996, p. 69), and can thus create substantial problems when two or more distinct cultures come into contact with each other. For this reason, Hofstede (1991, p. 4) suggests that “as soon as certain patterns of thinking, feeling and acting have established themselves within a person’s mind, (s)he must unlearn these before being able to learn something different”.

However, while the essentialist view of the social world may appear convenient for understanding cultural differences, it has also been criticised for being ‘reductionist’ and ‘stereotypical’ (Holliday, Hyde & Kullman, 2010). Holliday (2005), for example, was among the first to challenge this essen-tialist view, and to suggest that it aims at nothing more than to distinguish the ‘unproblematic’ culture/s of the West from the ‘deficient’ cultures of the East and the South. Dervin (2011) agrees with Holliday’s suggestion, adding that although the problems with essentialism are generally accepted, there still remains a tendency to otherise non-Western thought through an inverted image of what it means to be European. Thus, in his analysis of four studies dealing with the acculturation of Chinese students, he describes how researche...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Prologue
• PART I Theorising Critically
• PART II Researching Critically
• PART III Teaching Critically
• Epilogue
• Contributors
• Index