This book springs from the questions about language learning that have recurred for me since my early teaching career. In those early years I found myself asking what my students were learning, and how my teaching could most effectively promote their learning. Over time, my concerns for learning have been broadened to an interest in learners’ development as people.
These questions are situated within what I consider to be a humanistic view of education; one that perceives the contribution and value of education as leading to the betterment of society and of particular interest to me, how we can learn to live and flourish together in diversity. In my pursuit of answers to my questions or at least ways forward over many years, I have been drawn towards an intercultural orientation as a means of considering the relational and transformational power of communicating and engaging with others, across diverse languages and cultures. The key question that this book attempts to address is how language teachers might enable learners to develop their own intercultural outlook such that it becomes part of who they are, how they see the world and how they interact with diverse others in their lives. In writing this book, I am assuming that teachers of languages share similar questions and concerns, and will appreciate the attempt to articulate how one might grapple with the notion of development within an intercultural orientation in language teaching. In doing so, I hope this expands our understandings and enables us to attend to learners’ development with greater insight and self-awareness.
Changing and Challenges Times in Education
The first two decades of the twenty-first century have been tumultuous with global shifts in geopolitics and economic power, unprecedented mobility of people, ideas and artifacts, technological development and mass communication practices, within the context of climate change and most recently a global pandemic. These shifts are not novel but what is striking is the intensity, speed and scale of these changes, creating more extensive and intensive pressures and challenges on people and communities. The fluidity, mobility and multi-dimensional nature of communities, and of their peoples, knowledges, communication practices, and technologies, are reflected in notions such as ‘superdiversity’ (Blommaert, 2013).
Changing and challenging times require adaptation and response, and education will be crucial in considering what current and future societies need in order to meet these challenges. The recently released OECD 2030 goals for education (OECD, 2019) represent an attempt to outline how a future citizenry might be prepared for times that are likely to be more volatile, dynamic, and uncertain. The goals outline a set of knowledge, skills, understandings and dispositions intended to enable young people to not only survive but to flourish in the future. Similar policy and curricula initiatives in education settings around the world recognize that education in this century will need to respond to, and embrace diversity, indeed diversities, as both a characteristic of students, and also as constitutive of learning itself. These ideas are typically referred to in terms such as internationalization, international mindedness, global citizenship, intercultural understandings and values based education. A central concern in these notions is how to enable young people to participate effectively in increasingly diverse communities, particularly through developing attributes such as empathy, solidarity, and appreciation of otherness. Being able to deftly navigate diversity with sophisticated communication repertoires is likely to be a decisive feature in whether individuals and communities can learn to live together and continue to grow in their knowledge and understandings.
Developing multilingual capabilities will be integral to not only communicative deftness but also to the kind of mutual insights and attunement to otherness required to genuine bring about greater respect, social cohesion and equality. This requires both a multilingual and an intercultural orientation in education and in languages education.
Within languages education, an intercultural orientation assumes diversity as it starting point, as it views teaching and learning as acts of meaning creation and exchange that are fundamentally linguistically and culturally situated. Language teaching therefore has the potential to make a significant and distinctive contribution to goals furthering how we learn to live together in diversity. Claims such as the value of language learning for enhancing social cohesion and mutual respect have often been made yet seldom realized with evidence of how such learning is actually achieved. In addition, understandings of what it means to teach and learn a language, have undergone substantial shifts in recent decades, and there is a need to reconsider the goals of language teaching and learning for contemporary times, and what this means for understanding how such learning develops.
Reconceptualising Language Teaching
Accompanying the global changes outlined earlier, have also been changes in theories of how language(s) are learned and used. For the latter part of the previous century, second language learning theories were dominated by cognitivism that focussed on information processing models of language learning that were understood as taking place within the minds of individuals (Atkinson, 2011). In more recent decades, the field has expanded substantially in response to insights from emergentist approaches (Ellis & Larsen-Freeman, 2006), and the social turn (Block, 2003) that has drawn on psychology based theories of human consciousness in developing a sociocultural theory of learning that foregrounds language learning as a social achievement (Lantolf & Thorne, 2006). In addition, there has been increased recognition of the role of culture in language socialization, use and learning (Byram & Feng, 2004; Kramsch, 1993) as well as insights from studies of multilingualism that show complex capabilities or a kind of ‘multicompetence’ (Cook, 1992) that differs significantly from the language learning of monolinguals. These seismic shifts have challenged the long-standing reference point for language learning of the ‘native speaker’, and have led to a review of the goals for language/s learning that are more aligned to bilingual and multilingual learners. Most recently attempts have been made to bring together contemporary understandings in order to conceptualise a holistic framework for second language teaching and learning (The Douglas Fir Group, 2016) and a reorientation of the goals of language learning (Leung & Scarino, 2016) towards a functional multilingual as the norm.
Concurrently there have been major shifts in understandings of the foundational concepts of language and culture that underpin theories of language learning and use. In relation to language, understandings have essentially expanded from a view of language as code to language as a dynamic social semiotic, a shared and embodied resource for making meaning (Halliday, 1978; Shohamy, 2006). In a similar vein, understandings of culture have changed from ‘high culture’ associated with reified artifacts and knowledge, to culture as everyday practices and ‘webs of significance’ (Geertz, 1973) that are shared by groups, to the discursive practices, meanings and interpretive frames associated with particular communities (Liddicoat & Scarino, 2013; Risager, 2011). Furthermore, culture is no longer considered as peripheral in conceptualisations of language learning but is positioned as core to it (Paige, Jorstad, Siaya, Klein, & Colby, 2003), inseparable (in the main) from language (Risager, 2006).
When language and culture are considered as interrelated symbolic systems, they both come into play in the learning of a language, and in the learning of a language and culture in addition to one’s own, there is necessarily an i...