Foreign Language and Culture Learning from a Dialogic Perspective (Modern Language in Practice, 15) - Softcover

Morgan, Dr. Carol; Cain, Albane

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1853594989 ISBN 13: 9781853594984

Publisher: Multilingual Matters, 2000

Synopsis

This book analyses an intercultural project undertaken by French and English 14-year-olds based on an exchange of materials created by the pupils and focused on the topic of law and order. The project was based on a view of learning as a dialogic process interacting with others. A first language and home culture is acquired through such interaction. This project sought to realise this dialogic process in a more meaningful way than is often the case in foreign language classrooms.

About this title

About the Author

Carol Morgan (University of Bath) and Albane Cain (University of Cergy-Pontoise) have worked together on intercultural projects in the past and both have been involved in teaching and researching foreign language learning and cultural studies for many years in schools and universities. The research project described here was undertaken by Carol Morgan, and Albane Cain acted as a critical friend in helping to analyse the processes and products of the project.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Foreign Language and Culture Learning from a Dialogic Perspective

By Carol Morgan, Albane Cain

Multilingual Matters

Copyright © 2000 Carol Morgan and Albane Cain
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-85359-498-4

Contents

Preface, vii, 
Introduction, 1, 
1 The Theoretical Context, 4, 
2 The Anglo-French Project, 32, 
3 The Intratextual Dialogue, 44, 
4 The Intertextual Dialogue, 64, 
5 An Illuminative Dialogue, 78, 
6 The Viability of the Project, 100, 
7 Conclusion, 109, 
8 References, 112, 
Appendix A, 120, 
Appendix B, 123, 
Appendix C, 151, 
Appendix D, 153, 
Appendix E, 157, 
Appendix F, 158, 
Index, 161, 

CHAPTER 1

The Theoretical Context

In order to understand the complex and intermeshed relationship between language and culture, it is helpful to take perhaps a new perspective on foreign language and culture learning, namely looking at its dialogic nature, and recognising that language, communication and culture are all constructed through interaction (Bakhtin, 1981, 1984 & 1986; Vygotsky, 1962). In learning one's mother tongue and the cultural values of one's own country, development and socialisation takes place in stages: through the family, school and workplace (Doyé, 1992; Bourdieu, 1990; Kohlberg et al., 1983). Meanings and values are learnt concurrently with language (Bruner, 1974), with continual interaction and revision occurring. In the foreign-language classroom, the process is, of necessity, truncated with many important elements omitted, so that the language process is unlike that of mother-tongue learning although clearly many elements are shared (Bailly, 1995, 1998a, 1998b).

In this chapter we shall move from the broad focus of the relationship between language and culture to the much narrower focus of the foreign-language classroom, using the notion of dialogue as an informing construct.

The Dialectic of Language and Culture

The multi-stranded and highly interactive relationship between language and culture and the very different yet integrated character of these two elements would seem to justify substituting the term 'dialectic' for 'dialogic' in considering the very broadest dimension of this category.

Halliday and Bourdieu

'Dialectic' presumes a three-stage process: a statement (thesis), counter-statement (antithesis) and a bringing together of the two (synthesis). In the following quotation from Halliday, he suggests a dialectical relationship between text and context where the interaction between the two elements creates something that belongs to both: 'The relationship between text and context is a dialectical one; the text creates the context as much as the context creates the text ... part of the environment for any text is a set of previous texts that are taken for granted as shared among those taking part' (Halliday & Hasan, 1989: 47; see also Barton & Hamilton, 1998). We can apply this comment to our own context and substitute 'language' for 'text' and 'culture' for 'context'. We need to be aware of the problem of over-simplification and false distinctions. Kress and Hodge(1988: 73) warn us that 'every classification scheme is tidier than the reality it classifies', and the work by Lakoff (1987) on the unreliability of taxonomies or categories also gives similar warnings. However, it is possible to track significant features in the relationship between language and culture which can aid understanding and which point to how such understanding might be realised and promoted within a foreign-language classroom context.

It is useful also to consider Bourdieu's notion (1990: 131) of 'habitus', ways of thinking and understanding social reality, which he locates squarely in a cultural context: not only because these ways of thinking construct our understanding of culture, but also because these ways of thinking or constructs are themselves formed by that culture. In both cases, the operation reflects the social position in which it was constructed. In addition Bourdieu suggests that such constructs are not limited to personal and individual perception, but may also become a collective enterprise. He thus includes both a personal and a global frame.

If we take Halliday's and Bourdieu's comments together, we can see that both the cognitive structuring processes and the language that is produced relating to these schemata have an interactive, reciprocal relationship with the cultural context in which they occur. This very interaction is the core relation between language and culture. Language occurs always in a cultural context, and the values of that context will accrue to the lexical items as they are learnt (Vygotsky, 1981; Halliday & Hasan, 1989; Quasthoff, 1986; Goodwin & Duranti, 1992; Ochs, 1986; Voloshinov, 1973).

The referential/denotative relation of language and culture

Given, then, that language occurs within and forms part of a cultural context and that the lexical items and cognitive structures informing those items are all culturally bound, it is clear that in order to understand language we need to understand the culture that produced it and to which it refers. The denotative, referential aspect of language relies on an understanding of cultural norms (Widdowson, 1988; Rommetveit, 1988; Kress & Hodge, 1988).

One aspect of language emphasised by Rommetveit is important in the context of foreign language learners. He condemns the myth of literal meaning:

What is fundamentally wrong with the myth of literal meaning is ... a total incapacity to capture certain basic prerequisites for linguistically mediated intersubjectivity ... the dependency of linguistic meaning upon tacitly taken-for-granted background conditions and its embeddedness in communicative social interaction. (Rommetveit, 1988: 14–15)

The danger here for the foreign-language classroom is evident: the belief in literal meaning (reinforced of course by the existence of dictionaries and computerised translators) can lead to a superficial and sometimes misleading understanding, where the cultural context of the country and the context of the individual are ignored. There is no taken-for-granted one-to-one correspondence between languages. Each language operates a different discourse system, where lexical items often have different collocations or clusters of associated vocabulary. A foreign-language learner must migrate from one language system to another.

The culture that language refers to may not only be a macro level of collectively shared meanings (Geertz, 1973) but may operate on other levels. Schwerdtfeger (1993: 38) talks of her own language as 'abbreviations which encompass my very personal meanings of things', and children within a foreign-language classroom will need to be reminded of differing ideolects or personal versions of a language within a single language, giving form to idiosyncratic schemata and personal opinions.

It is important to remember as well that in the school classroom a particular kind of representational interaction is taking place. Wells in his research on children learning language, both before and during school, points to the key role performed by the teacher in 'using the power of language as a system of symbols to represent objects and events that are absent or no more than hypothetical possibilities' (Wells, 1986: 111; see also Bruner, 1974). Thus for learners, language refers not only to observable objects and actions, but to ideas and opinions that need to be deduced and imagined. If we translate this into a foreign language context, for the learner of German the understanding of Kartoffelsalat is likely to be much more accessible than the abstract and elusive concept of Ordnung ist alles (Kramsch, 1993).

Language creates cultural categories

As well as language referring to and denoting specific cultural factors, there is also the Whorfian theory that language forms culture by creating certain classifying principles, the number of colour categories for example (Whorf, 1956). Here then one can point to the phenomenon of the untranslatable in the foreign-language classroom, where mother-tongue equivalents are unhelpful, and where a comprehensive knowledge of the culture is needed in order to understand the difference between mother tongue and foreign language referents (see Wierzbicka, 1991, 1992, 1997). Riley (1991: 56–7) provides concrete examples of particular words structuring descriptions of reality in his comparison of French, English and Finnish sentences. Bruner's experiments with Wolof and French children, however, have shown that language categories do not necessarily affect cognitive categories (here challenging Bourdieu's claims): the Wolof children in his experiment were able to discriminate on the basis of colour without having the necessary lexical colour categories (Bruner, 1974: 382).

The inference here, then, is that understanding of constructs lying beyond one's own cultural boundaries is possible, but that one's own language may be a hindrance not a support (Tul'viste, 1987). Bruner's description (1974: 327) of our mother tongue as a kind of filtering grid: 'linguistic encoding, which places a selective lattice between us and the physical environment' reminds us that a language can be restrictive in terms of the culture it embodies and describes and that, in learning another language and culture, we need to learn both alternative new lexical items and also frequently alternative conceptual categories (Cain & Murphy-Lejeune, 1997; Cain, Murphy-Lejeune & Kramsch, 1996). There is an interactive dialectical relationship between language and culture that cannot be ignored. In a foreign-language context Byram and Morgan (1994: 23) point to the fact that it is 'possible for learners to encode many but not all of their existing schemata in another language but in that case they are not learning a new language but a new code.' In the project described in the following chapters, we took the topic of Law and Order and asked for students' interpretation of this as a way of accessing their schema of the topic (this is discussed in greater detail in Chapter 5).

Culture 'polices' language

If the argument thus far has concentrated on the importance of language constituting, constructing and denoting culture, there are equally important relationships operating in an obverse direction. One important feature of a cultural context is that it will police the kind of language that is allowed. Lindstrom helpfully distinguishes this organising function of the cultural context:

context. ... [is] an apparatus by which our talk most of the time is organized and controlled. A set of devices and procedures that protect ruling powers and truth ... people talk in a context of existing discursive orders that (1) endow people with different qualifications and opportunities to talk and with different rights to talk the truth; (2) establish regions of knowledge and regions of silence; (3) set truth conditions - a 'regime of truth' and (4) link that regime of truth in a circular relationship with systems of power which produce and sustain it, and to effects of power which it induces and which extend it. (Lindstrom, 1992: 104–5)

The dialectical relationship between language and culture here assumes a more instrumental character, where cultural norms prescribe language. Habermas (1984: 85–7) similarly nominates 'normative' as one of his four kinds of interactive behaviour (together with 'strategic', 'dramaturgic', and communicative'. Clearly the specific cultural context or norm will be critical here.

Rosen points to the prescriptiveness of the classroom cultural context in particular in his study of narrative: 'as a communicative context, the classroom is subject to rules for speaking which constitute massive constraints on pupils' (1984: 17). In learning a foreign language, the teacher is likely to 'police' the language used since the language available is restricted (provided by the textbook and the teacher). However there is a further dimension, since students will also need to understand the rules of appropriacy tenable in the foreign culture which may not accord with those in their own cultures or with those in operation in the foreign-language classroom. Students can misjudge the offensiveness of language, for example, since conventions and taboos will be less well known in the foreign language.

Cultural empowerment through language

Refinement of this policing or prescriptive relationship between culture and language is present in the notion of 'access'. Both Bruner (1974) and de Hérédia (1986) underscore the excluding role that language may play in accessing certain cultural power groups: 'it may very well be that a ghetto-dweller's language training unfits him for taking jobs in the power-and prestige-endowing pursuits of middle-class culture' (Bruner, 1974: 459); 'for immigrants ... integration into a society ... exercises a certain influence on language acquisition (which may be in terms of motivation)' (de Hérédia 1986: 51, our translation) The question of cultural empowerment through language is one often tacitly sidestepped in the learning of a foreign language. It is helpful for students both to understand the dialectical relationship of culture and language here, and also themselves to be enabled by it. In other words they need to understand that not all groups in the societies that speak the target language they are learning have equal access to that language; and that as 'outside' learners of that language they may be learning particular varieties of that language.

Different cultural views of 'language'

Finally we should not ignore the validation of language by culture. Not only do we recognise that 'members of different cultures differ in the inferences they draw from perceptual cues' (Bruner, 1974: 370). But also that speech or language itself may be considered quite differently by different cultures (Halliday & Hasan, 1989). Raymonde Carroll (1987) in her description of cultural differences between France and America points to the very personal private nature of speech for a French person compared with the more public and casual norms in the US. Clearly in learning a foreign language one needs to be aware of the cultural norms associated with the act of speaking itself, part of what de Hérédia (1986) terms les comportements langagiers in order to communicate effectively.

The relationship then between language and culture is not a simple one and needs to be understood as an interactive dialectical process. Similarly the separate notions of both language (in its linguistic and its semiotic dimensions) and culture can be seen as dialogic in themselves, as the following sections will demonstrate.

Language as dialogue/culture as dialogue

In one sense of course it is an artificial exercise to separate out the different strands of language, semiosis and culture (particularly since this section has underlined the integrated relationship they enjoy). However it may help in clarifying the notion of 'dialogue' to do so, since writers in different disciplines have interpreted this notion in different ways. Post-modern approaches to literature for example favour the identification of different voices in narrative (Bakhtin, 1984). The relatively new disciplines of discourse analysis and conversational analysis deconstruct 'voices' both within interlocutors' speech and between interlocutors; and cultural researchers concern themselves with the dialogic interactions between ethnographers and their subjects (Mannheim & Tedlock, 1996). If we take 'dialogue' to mean the coming together of two people, two discourses, two ideas, then three important issues seem to emerge:

• firstly the seminal points of reference for many writers seem to be the Soviet writers of the 1920s and 1930s: Bakhtin, Voloshinov and Vygotsky;

• secondly the specialness of an occasion where this interface occurs. Attinasi (1996: 36) is particularly emphatic on this point with his study of life-enhancing dialogues '[dialogue] ... creates a special semi-private space and time shared by the two interlocutors to the partial exclusion of the rest of the world';

• and finally the special nature of the dialogic interface, where opportunities are opened up to the language (and culture) of others. As Bakhtin (1981: 293) succinctly puts it: 'language ... lies on the borderline between oneself and the other. The word in language is half someone else's'.

In thinking, then, of the last two issues in the foreign-language classroom context, it would be helpful to query the significance or specialness we accord to dialogic interaction, both within foreign language texts and between mother tongue and foreign language speakers. In addition we could draw learners' attention to what may happen in dialogue: for example that you may echo someone else, that someone else's response can alter the direction of the interaction. All too often I suspect dialogue is used in foreign-language classrooms as rehearsal, or example without its special qualities being noted.

The Dialogic Nature of Language

In turning to language itself, one can identify three different interpretations of 'dialogue' that emerge in critical literature:

• the co-active/enactive;

• the retrospective;

• the deictic.

Coactive/enactive dialogue

Dialogue is traditionally interpreted as two people talking. One may see this process as either contiguous or interactive/co-active/enactive (see Figure 1.1).

The two interlocutors may merely be mutually presenting ideas to each other, or the relationship may be interpreted more interactively as one or both parties enabling or affecting the other. Mannheim and Tedlock (1996: 4; see also Bakhtin's anacretic and syncretic dialogue, 1984: 110–11) usefully distinguish two categories of dialogue, which match these two possibilities:

• 'formal' presentative dialogue: 'the economics of verbal exchange;'

• and 'functional' interactive dialogue': 'a social field across which multiple voices and multiple cultural logics contend with each other.'

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1853594989
• ISBN 13: 9781853594984
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 168