When I was at primary school my teacher told me I should not read so many fairy tales. I did not listen. To me fantasy was much more interesting than reality. I was a dreamer. As I grew up, languages became my new fairy tales. They allowed me to go armchair travelling, to escape and leave the familiar behind. Of course, it has not all been plain sailing. At times, speaking other languages has made me invisible. I did not fit in. I was not recognised or easily pigeonholed. The sort of language speaker and language learner I embodied was not represented in the mainstream. But I was not interested in becoming ‘English’ or conforming to an ideal. I didn’t want to declare my new sense of identity to belong to any of the available categories either: Catalan, Spanish, Black, White, Caucasian, European, British. How does one talk about one’s cultural identity? I did not feel comfortable in any of the ‘skins’ available to me. I wanted to create something different, a new ‘me’.
I did not want to take residence in a foreign land but in a wonderland where I could taste magic new sounds, enact mysterious social rituals and enjoy beautiful and bizarre new vistas. But I was told that before getting to know the culture, before socialising and creating my own worlds, I needed to sweep floors, tidy up the house. I was told to learn phrasal verbs, vocabulary, do gap-fill exercises, to read the great and the good, Dante Alighieri, William Shakespeare, Arabic texts from the Al-Andalus. I was told to pretend to be someone else, not me. ‘Let’s do a ‘role-play’, teachers would say, ‘let’s do a group task, this will expose you to the right kind of language and then without much effort will make you fluent in the language’. I did not engage with it and watched with envy and resignation as the ugly step sisters were allowed to go somewhere else, to dreamland. Never me. I studied hard, but my heart was not in it. I could not feel anything; my heart was frozen.
Finally, I resolved to revel in and inject the English language with my own life and my own fiction. I resolved to create a wonderland where I could realise my personal dreams, a place where I could figure out different versions of ‘me’. A place where I could use linguistic incantations, spells and powers to create new personal worlds. I could finally ‘take flight’.
Let’s now fast forward to twenty-first-century England. Things have not changed much. Today, language learners are still told not to believe in fairy tales. They are told that languages are essential and advantageous for travelling, for getting a better job, passing an exam or being able to better understand or get closer to relatives or friends. They are told that they may also learn a new language because they want to fulfil a long-held dream of inhabiting another language or sounding like someone else. But many language learners are and should be more ambitious than this; they should follow a personal fantasy, an alternative and subversive world.
Language learning allows us to connect with the world in new ways by rebelling against the long-held belief that we are born and die with the same cultural identity . This book argues for this empowering agenda for the language learner, one that looks into the creation of personal worlds which do not fit political and national boundaries of cultures and languages, and the upholding of linguistic standards. Instead this vision drops old national labels to allow the learner to explore new horizons, new ways of belonging to other languages and cultures, and new ways of dwelling in them. Learners embark on personal journeys where they draw their own cartographies of the world which use the force of perception , affect and creativity to experience and fashion new road-maps of the world and new interpretations. This view of language learning claims that languages and cultures are not forever; they come in different versions and sizes to fit the bodies of their owners and their circumstances, and they are not only ‘acquired’ and ‘learnt’, but also ‘lived’.
In order to develop such an understanding of language learning this book presents a radical turn in Second Language Acquisition (SLA) by introducing a view of language learning that challenges rationalist , instrumental and empiricist approaches to language learning theory. It argues for an understanding of language learning that moves away from looking at it as something that can be isolated and studied out of context to looking at the interpretative and complex processes involved in the fashioning of new cultural worlds and new multilingual identities.
The Personal World of the Language Learner argues for different purposes and goals for language learning that heralds a change of focus in additional language education, one that distances itself from an approach to language teaching that has an orientation to the job market and other instrumental and goal-oriented paradigms that came with the development of Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) and its utilitarian ideology. Indeed, the spread of a particular version of Communicative Competence and CLT, first to English Language Teaching (ELT) and then to Modern Languages (ML), developed into a language pedagogy model that focused on the transactional, the transfer of information that linked language learning to career opportunities and the expansion of global exchange of economic and cultural capital (Block 2002; Kramsch 2005). Despite the fact that the theorisation of communicative competence was based on more socio-cultural and ethnographic understandings of language and communication, first advanced by M.A.K. Halliday’s and Dell Hymes’ writings in the 1970s, these were not taken up by mainstream versions of CLT and its interpretations of Communicative Competence (Leung 2005, 2010). Instead, the more pragmatic and instrumental interpretations gained ground in the prevailing definitions of Communicative Competence.
As a result, the development of Modern Languages and English Language Teaching has been built on a CLT ideology that on the one hand has not provided sufficient for the socio-cultural aspects of language learning and its socialisation processes, and on the other has limited the ways in which individuals could build on their most personal , emotional and creative needs. Within this state of affairs, mainstream psychological and cognitive approaches to SLA and CLT methodologies have prevented a vision of the language learner who invokes humanistic ideals with his/her development of the self and the construction of personal language learning projects. This book argues for a change in the direction of language teaching towards a language pedagogy that focuses on the development and transformation of the self .
The increased attention on the subject of identity and emotion in language learning (e.g., Benesch 2012; Block 2007a, b; Dewaele 2010; Kramsch 2009; Norton 2000; Pavlenko 2005) challenges theoretical frameworks and epistemologies of language learning that are only beginning to throw light on the language learning experience and the creation of personally relevant linguistic and cultural worlds.
This book will use a original data and a review of the literature to illustrate a new theoretical framework that attempts to provide a paradigm for the cultivation of the personal in language learning. The data discussed in this book is taken from a study conducted over 12 months in 2008–2009, and it comprises a rich collection of interviews and narratives of learners of Arabic, Catalan and Serbian/Croatian.
The theoretical paradigm indicated above by points out new ways of looking at data and claims new types of data for SLA research. In order to illustrate this I will draw on my own data set as well as examples from literary sources. This will be done in order to discuss and argue for the need of new theoretical tools to better explain the language learning experience from the point of view of language learners’ subjectivities and intersubjectivities . For the reader who is interested in methodological issues, see Ros i Solé (2012). Below, I give a summary of the ideas presented throughout the six chapters that make up this volume.
Chapter 2, ‘The Humanisation of Language Learning’, argues for a radical shift in SLA and language learning pedagogy research. In spite of the fact that speaking an additional language has been long recognised as a way to achieve personal fulfilment in language policy statements (e.g., DfES 2002; CEFR 2001), humanistic and subjective perspectives on language learning have been confined to the margins of the discipline (see Kramsch 2002, 2009; Larsen-Freeman 1997; Phipps and González 2004, for exceptions). This chapter aims to shift the personal to the centre ground of SLA by introducing more subjective and experiential perspectives to language learning as an alternative and yet key component of SLA research.
It argues that SLA’s pro-Enlightenment epistemological approach, so far dominant in the field, has favoured a view of language learning as a mechanistic and atomised process which underplays holistic, symbolic and experiential views of language learning. Instead, a humanistic orientation to SLA calls for holistic approaches that see the learner as a whole being rather than the sum of his/her parts , whilst favouring methodologies that present detailed and thick descriptions within emic stances, such as the use of ethnography and narratives. Such an approach also necessitates a shift from rationalistic and empiricist methodologies to phenomenological frameworks, which place the emphasis of the research enquiry on the search for meanings and essences and the wholeness of experience, rather than on measurements of isolated phenomena and their components (Mustakas 1994).
Chapter 3, ‘Lines of Thought’, contends that SLA needs to go beyond the purely linguistic in the communicative experience by uncovering the so far obscured personal and experiential dimensions of language learning. In order to do this, I argue that a new theoretical kit is needed. This chapter will draw on philosophical thought to throw light on this unchartered terrain in order to construct more complex and richer understandings of the subject as a sentient, agentive and creative human being. In such a view, and in contrast to the linearity of more rationalistic approaches to the subject, language learning is seen as a subversive stance on the self : as a way of taking risks, and multiple and non-linear paths of development. Philosophical schools of thought that take such a complex conceptualisation of the subject will be invoked in order to throw light on this malleable but fractured self: a subject-in-progress. I will first discuss the concept of Bildung proposed by Wilhelm von Humboldt , a German nineteenth-century philosopher and educational reformer who believed that education’s main goal was that of placing the ...