Developing Intercultural Perspectives on Language Use

Exploring Pragmatics and Culture in Foreign Language Learning

Troy McConachy

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781783099344
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Teaching Language Arts
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Many language teachers recognise the importance of integrating intercultural learning into language learning, but how this can be best achieved is not always apparent. This is particularly the case in foreign language learning contexts where teachers are working with a prescribed textbook and opportunities to use the language outside the classroom are limited. This book argues that teachers can work creatively with conventional resources and utilise classroom experiences in order to help learners interpret aspects of communication in insightful ways and develop awareness of the influence of cultural assumptions and values on language use. The book provides extensive analysis of a range of classroom interactions to demonstrate how teachers and learners can work together to construct opportunities for intercultural learning through reflection on pragmatics.

1Pragmatics and Culture in Communicative Language Teaching

Introduction

Since the communicative turn in foreign language teaching, one of the biggest classroom aims (and difficulties) has been to teach language as a dynamic system of meaning potential rather than simply as a structural system. To teach ‘meaning’ is an incredibly complex affair in many respects. Within the context of communication, meaning is something which must ultimately be constructed by individuals as they pay close attention to each other’s verbal and non-verbal cues and mobilize background knowledge and assumptions to interpret utterances within the flow of discourse. Moreover, such interpretation must take into account the sociocultural context in which utterances are exchanged, including the relationships between participants and what is being conveyed, not simply in terms of information but also in terms of the identities of the speakers and their social positioning vis-à-vis one another (Kramsch, 2009). The situation is even more complex in the case of intercultural communication, as ways of reading sociocultural context and the weighting given to particular aspects of context can be interpreted very differently, as can ideas about how speakers are expected to behave in view of their social and interpersonal roles (Spencer Oatey, 2008). Language learners, too, are actively engaged in interpretative processes right from the beginning of learning. Learners engage with the foreign language on the basis of existing assumptions about the nature of the social world, the way individuals interact in a range of social and interpersonal contexts, and what communicative behaviours are considered preferable over others. Within the foreign language classroom there is much potential for promoting intercultural learning by drawing attention to the ways in which participants in interaction, including learners themselves, construct and interpret meanings. However, whether this potential is realized or not is ultimately dependent on how the links between language and culture, as well as the learners’ awareness of these links, are conceptualized. This chapter will focus on the conceptualization of these links within communicative language teaching (CLT) and discuss the ways in which views of pragmatic awareness dominant in the field have constrained the potential for intercultural learning.

The Place of Culture in the Communicative Turn

CLT has been strongly predicated on the existence of a close relationship between language and culture since its inception, although this relationship has not necessarily been well articulated within classroom practice. The influential work done on the ethnography of speaking in anthropology (Hymes, 1972), as well as the work by the natural language philosophers (Austin, 1962; Searle, 1969; Wittgenstein, 1958) helped to highlight the nature of language as a form of social action and the centrality of cultural knowledge and assumptions to how communicative acts are structured and understood. Particularly influential to language teaching was Hymes (1972), whose notion of ‘communicative competence’ inspired applied linguistics to see the goals and methods of language teaching in new ways. Hymes (1972) argued that cultural knowledge is essential to any speaker’s communicative competence, shaping judgements as to the significance of particular utterances and communicative sequences within larger speech events.

This competence … is integral with attitudes, values and motivations concerning language, its features and uses, and integral with competence for, and attitudes toward, the interrelation of language with the other codes of communicative conduct. (Hymes, 1972: 60)

Culture helps individuals recognize the speech events which help constitute social life and the implicit and explicit norms which relate to these events and the individuals who take part in them. As such, it shapes the interpretive frameworks through which members of a speech community locate particular phrases, adjacency pairs, speech act sequences, conversational routines and other linguistic phenomena within the social activities that they help constitute (Atkinson & Heritage, 1984). Importantly, culture gives individuals a sense of what is expected behaviour given the sociocultural context in which language is used. This understanding of language as a tool for negotiating social life resonated with many applied linguists, and subsequently led to the operationalization of communicative competence for the purposes of language teaching by Canale and Swain (1980), Bachman (1990), and others. Most models see the interface between language and culture in terms of two types of linguistic mapping – the mapping between linguistic forms and functions and the mapping between linguistic functions and features of sociocultural context. For instance, in Canale and Swain’s (1980) work, culture is most closely related to ‘sociolinguistic competence’, which encompasses ‘rules of use’ and ‘rules of discourse’ for spoken interaction in context. ‘Rules of use’ concerns both the appropriateness of particular utterances for achieving particular functions, and the appropriateness of choice of communicative function in a given sociocultural context. ‘Rules of discourse’, on the other hand, concerns the appropriateness of the sequencing of utterances within a specific speech event. Culture is thus seen in terms of knowledge of how to linguistically formulate utterances and situate them appropriately given the nature of the speech event and other contextual variables at play.

Viewing appropriateness from the dual perspective of form-function mappings and function-context mappings resonates with the distinction between pragmalinguistics and sociopragmatics (Leech, 1983; Thomas, 1983). Pragmalinguistic knowledge allows the individual to select appropriate forms for carrying out particular communicative functions, while sociopragmatic knowledge guides the individual in making judgements regarding the appropriateness of language use in view of sociocultural context and the roles and relationships relevant to a situation. This is why Leech (1983: 10) famously remarked that ‘sociopragmatics is the sociological interface of pragmatics’. Whenever language is used in its social context, its meaning is only interpretable through ‘social values and expectations’ that fill out a particular context of use (Coupland & Jaworski, 2004: 19). Essentially, cultural assumptions about social roles, relationships, gender, age, locations, genres of communication, and many other variables influence communicative choices and the ways in which individuals make sense of communicative acts within larger social activities. Cultural knowledge, therefore, is fundamental to ­communicative competence.

The fact that CLT builds on notions of communicative competence (Hymes, 1972), and thus aims to develop learners’ ability to communicate ‘appropriately’ in the target language, naturally implies an engagement with culture. However, although the communicative turn in language teaching was largely successful, the role of culture in communication has often been minimized within language learning curricula, materials, and pedagogy. The shift towards communicative competence as goal of language teaching was reflected in the functional-notional syllabi that emerged out of the Council of Europe (van Ek & Alexander, 1975) and the work done by Wilkins (1976). This work gave important consideration to how languages are for real communicative purposes, how ‘authentic’ language use could be captured in textbooks, and how ‘authentic’ contexts for use could be simulated in classroom settings. Although this is a sound direction for language teaching to take, what became problematic as CLT was popularized was that too much attention was devoted to linguistic realization patterns and not enough attention to the cultural norms of appropriateness that underlie the social activities within which linguistic patterns manifest. This is closely related to a reductionist view of communication that came to characterize CLT.

Discourses on CLT have frequently treated communication as a primarily transactional process involving the bridging of an ‘information gap’. The bridging of an information gap is essentially the process of transferring the information in the mind of one speaker to the mind of another speaker, also referred to as the telementation model of communication (Eisenchlas, 2009). Much discussion of pedagogy has been concerned with how information gaps can be created in the classroom so that students can use the linguistic resources at their disposal to ‘negotiate meaning’ and bridge the gap. This process of ‘negotiation of meaning’ is in turn purported to promote language acquisition (Long, 1983; Varonis & Gass, 1985). However, the nature of the ‘meaning’ being negotiated tends to be seen in terms of information exchange, which can be achieved by the application of an inventory of strategies for getting one’s meaning across (Magnan, 2008; Savignon, 1990). This is not to imply that indexical aspects of language such as speech acts (most commonly referred to as ‘functions’) have not received attention in CLT. However, for the most part, the ability to use these aspects of language has been equated with the ‘capacity to fit appropriate language to specific transactions’ (Byram, 1991: 18). What this has meant is that the role that culture plays in constituting a framework for the negotiation of meaning in a true sense has been obscured. Scarino (2007) explains:

Communication was reduced to the process of developing ‘skills’, without developing students’ understanding of the way that language and culture are integral to personal interpretation and meaning making with others in social interaction. In practice, with some forms of CLT, classroom interactive activities or tasks became no more than ‘display’ monologues’, pseudo-communication activities designed to ‘make students talk’, rather than talk as the joint realization of potential meanings in conversation. (Scarino, 2007: 7)

The reductionist view of communication is particularly evident in the way that speech acts have been treated in many ‘communicative’ coursebooks. One problem observable in many textbooks is that speech acts are not treated as contextualized social acts, but as things that can be achieved by correctly selecting the appropriate phrase from a list of phrases in a box (Ren & Han, 2016). For instance, textbooks frequently present the speech act of requesting as a matter of choosing among phrases listed in a box such as ‘Would you mind … ?’, ‘Could you … ?’ or ‘Can you … ?’. Phrases are often simply listed without further guidance. The problem here is thus one of decontextualization (Dewaele, 2008).

One of the ways in which textbooks do aim to contextualize language for carrying out speech acts is by situating them within short dialogues constructed by textbook writers. This is certainly preferable to simply having a list of phrases in that there is more potential for learners to consider how speech acts might be utilized in connection with larger communicative goals in a given interaction. However, the dialogues themselves are often absent of information describing the sociocultural context of the interaction, such as the speakers’ gender, age, relationship, location, and more. The message that comes across from such dialogues is that what is actually important is that the learners simply scan through the dialogue to identify where the target phrases are being used, and that the larger communicative and relational concerns are peripheral (Martínez-Flor & Usó-Juan, 2006; McConachy, 2009; Cohen & Ishihara, 2013). This orientation to communication is reinforced by the fact that comprehension questions following dialogues tend to focus almost exclusively on the retrieval of factual information. Conversely, analytical questions that prompt learners to reflect on the significance of linguistic choices observable in the dialogue, to consider their naturalness or appropriateness, or to compare strategies with the L1, are largely absent (McConachy, 2009).

These tendencies reflect the broader orientation towards a ‘transactional’ view of communication and the tendency in CLT to underplay ‘the symbolic link between language and culture, i.e., the use of language in discourse as enacting social roles and representing cultural perceptions and misperceptions’ (Kramsch, 2003: 21, emphasis in original). Of course, some might question the usefulness of promoting reflection on interaction represented in textbook dialogues, given that dialogues are often constructed for showcasing target utterances rather than being accurate representations of interaction. This is a point worth considering, because it is true that textbook dialogues have been criticized for presenting unrealistic examples of language use (Gilmore, 2007; Wolfson, 1981). However, one could counter that this is precisely why it is necessary to treat language in textbooks and any other learning resource as something to be examined, whether it can be defined as ‘authentic’ or not. Particularly given the global spread of languages and the concomitant diversification of speakership, learners will frequently encounter instances of language use that might not necessarily conform to narrow conceptions of ‘authentic’ language based on idealized native-speaker centred norms. It is important that learners are able to analytically engage with the language that they do encounter. From this perspective, the structural features discussed above are counterproductive in that they contribute to socializing language learners into a view of language as code rather than sociocultural resource.

One way in which communicative language textbooks have tried to make more explicit links between language and culture is through descriptions of communication styles associated with various national cultures drawn from early work in the field of intercultural communication studies (e.g. Hall, 1976; Hofstede, 1980). Within this work, national cultures are categorized as ‘low-context’ or ‘high-context’ according to highly general preferences for explicitness or implicitness in communication. Nations classified as low-context are typically regarded as displaying preference for ‘directness’, often tied to culture-level individualism. Contrastively, nations classified as high-context are suggested to value ‘indirectness’ in communication, usually as a reflection of culture-level collectivism (Gudykunst & Nishida, 1999; Gudykunst & Ting-Toomey, 1988). Based on such work, English language textbooks designed for the international market might advise learners that Japanese people value an ‘indirect’ or ‘polite’ communication style stemming from a cultural preference for ‘harmony’ in social relations (see McConachy & Hata, 2013, for a specific example of this).

The high degree of abstraction involved in such formulations results in an essentialist characterization of cultures not only because it presents cultures as uniform but because it obscures the context-dependency of actions and understandings of actions (Angouri, 2010; Holliday, 2009). Within such a framing, the indexical relationship between language (communication style) and culture (values) is positioned as static and uni-directional – that is, language simply represents culture (Kramsch, 2003). This obscures the reality that the specific ways in which communicative strategies such as indirectness are utilized depend very much on contextual assessments made by participants in any given encounter. Naturally, indirectness is not something that will be a salient feature of every communicative encounter, nor is it something that is inherent to a particular cultural group. Teaching the link between language and culture as primarily a matter of communication styles minimizes the role of speakers in constructing interactional responses to communicative needs and can thus inadvertently lead to the creation or reinforcement of stereotypical views of cultural groups.

As above, the overemphasis on decontextualized language patterns is problematic because it is too ‘micro’, whereas the emphasis on national-level communication styles is problematic because it is too ‘macro’. The former starts from language but fails to get to culture. The latter starts with culture, but essentializes the relationship between language and culture by not accounting for the dynamism which underlies how language is used and interpreted within the context of concrete social activity. If the place of cultural knowledge in the interpretation of spoken interaction remains obscure, learners may arrive at the misconception that the interactional conventions and associated cultural assumptions from one language can be unproblematically transferred across languages. It is therefore essential to make the link between culture and communication more transparent as it specifically relates to the interpretation of meanings in face-to-face interaction in specific settings. This is something which has been the goal of more explicit approaches to teaching aspects of pragmatics.

Pragmatics Teaching and the Notion of Pragmatic Awareness

Over the last few decades there has been increased recognition of the importance of more explicitly conceptualizing the norms associated with spoken interaction and finding ways to make them accessible to language learners (e.g. Alcón Soler, 2005; Bardovi-Harlig, 2001; Bardovi-Harlig & Dörnyei, 1998; Ifantidou, 2014; Kasper & Rose, 2002; Kondo, 2008; Martínez-Flor & Usó-Juan, 2010; Padilla Cruz, 2015; Rose, 2005; Schmidt, 1993; Taguchi, 2015; Takahashi, 2005; Takimoto, 2012; Usó-Juan & Martínez-Flor, 2008; van Compernolle, 2014). Theoretically, this would imply an engagement with the cultural assumptions surrounding pragmatic acts in various contexts of use. In practice, the potential for intercultural learning within instructional pragmatics has been constrained by the narrow ways in which pragmatic awareness (or meta-pragmatic awareness) has been operationalized and the disproportionate attention that has been given to pragma­linguistics over sociopragmatics within teaching and research.

The notion of pragmatic awareness has generally been conceptualized within the interlanguage perspective on language development. This perspective sees the learner’s L2 linguistic system as progressively moving along a developmental continuum towards a native-speaker norm (Selinker, 1972). The extent of linguistic transfer – understood as the unintentional application of L1 patterns and frames of understanding to the L2 – is seen as indicating how far the individual has progressed along the interlanguage continuum (Kasper & Dahl, 1991). Within the subdiscipline of interlanguage pragmatics, L2 pragmatic development is seen as a matter of reducing negative pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic transfer from the learner’s L1 while gradually incorporating more native-like pragmatic features into the learner’s developing linguistic system, thus becoming able to use and interpret the L2 appropriately according to native-speaker norms (Kasper, 1992). The primary aim of developing pragmatic awareness, therefore, is situated in reference to these interrelated goals. Arguments for the need to specifically develop learners’ pragmatic awareness stemmed from Schmidt’s (1990, 1993, 1995, 2010) influential ‘noticing hypothesis’, which posited that a certain degree of conscious attention to correlations between forms, meanings and contexts was necessary for acquisition (Kasper & Rose, 2001). This hypothesis theorizes awareness from the perspective of two related cognitive constructs: ‘noticing’ and ‘understanding’. Noticing is seen as the allocation of focal attention to features of input in specific instances of exposure, whereas understanding is a higher order form of awareness characterized by explicit knowledge of linguistic rules. In the case of acquisition of L2 morphosyntax, noticing requires that learners are able to detect form-meaning mappings in input, whereas understanding implies that learners are able to explain the mappings in terms of linguistic rules or principles. In the case of pragmatics, it is suggested that for learning to take place learners need to notice features of the input that allow them to infer consistent associations between linguistic forms, the functions they realize, and the aspects of context ...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Figures_and_Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Pragmatics and Culture in Communicative Language Teaching
• 2. Linking Pragmatics and Intercultural Language Learning
• 3. Developing a View of Language Use as Social Action
• 4. Reflection on Experience as a Resource for Intercultural Learning
• 5. Combining Performance and Reflection for Learning
• 6. Developing Intercultural Perspectives on Language Use
• Conclusion
• References
• Index