Lge & culture, Kramsch
Lge & culture, Kramsch
Lge & culture, Kramsch
Claire Kramsch
This paper surveys the research methods and approaches used in the multidisci-
plinary field of applied language studies or language education over the last fourty
years. Drawing on insights gained in psycho- and sociolinguistics, educational
linguistics and linguistic anthropology with regard to language and culture, it
is organized around five major questions that concern language educators. The
first is: How is cultural meaning encoded in the linguistic sign? It discusses how
the use of a symbolic system affects thought, how speakers of different languages
think differently when speaking, and how speakers of different discourses (across
language or in the same language) have different cultural worldviews. The second
question is: How is cultural meaning expressed pragmatically through verbal ac-
tion? It discusses the realization of speech acts across cultures, culturally-inflected
conversation analysis, and the use of cultural frames. The third question is: How
is culture co-constructed by participants in interaction? It discusses how applied
linguistics has moved from a structuralist to a constructivist view of language
and culture, from performance to performativity, and from a focus on culture to
a focus on historicity and subjectivity. The fourth question is: How is research on
language and culture affected by language technologies? The print culture of the
book, the virtual culture of the Internet, the online culture of electronic exchanges
all have their own ways of redrawing the boundaries of what may be said, written
and done within a given discourse community. They are inextricably linked to
issues of power and control. The last section explores the current methodological
trends in the study of language and culture: the increased questioning and politi-
cization of cultural reality, the increased interdisciplinary nature of research, the
growing importance of reflexivity, and the noticeable convergence of intercultural
communication studies and applied language studies in the study of language and
culture.
Given the overwhelming diversity of areas covered by the field of research called
“Applied Linguistics” (for a review, see Knapp 2014, de Bot in press) I will focus
here on the area acknowledged by Knapp as “by far the biggest and best known”,
namely language studies or language education. The publication in 1998 of the
little book Language and Culture (Kramsch 1998) in Henry Widdowson’s Oxford
Introductions to Language Study was a first attempt to stake out an area of Applied
Linguistics focused specifically on the relation of language and culture. There had
been before that several efforts to include “culture” in language education (see,
e.g., Lado 1957; Crawford-Lange & Lange 1984; Kramsch 1993; Seelye 1984) but
culture was not a concept that resonated with scholars in second language acquisi-
tion/applied linguistics, who were more psycho- and sociolinguistically oriented
and preferred to study language in its social or situational context (e.g., Selinker
& Douglas 1985). With the growing influence of anthropology and linguistic
anthropology in particular, the concept of culture in Applied Linguistics began
to shift from a stable national or social group entity to portable representations,
and from products, beliefs and behaviors to processes of identification, symbolic
power struggles and identity politics. Duranti and Goodwin Rethinking Context
(1992), that appeared in the same decade as Scollon & Scollon Intercultural
Communication (1995), Gumperz and Levinson Rethinking Linguistic Relativity
(1996), and Hanks Language and Communicative Practices (1996), served as inspi-
ration to Kramsch (1993, 1998 and 2004).
By the end of the nineties, the modernist concept of culture was coming to be
replaced by late modernist concepts like historicity and subjectivity, that put the
focus on the historical and subjective nature of culture, conceived as co-construct-
ed “membership in a discourse community that shares a common social space and
history, and common imaginings. Even when they have left that community, its
members may retain, wherever they are, a common system of standards for per-
ceiving, believing, evaluating, and acting” (Kramsch 1998: 10). Such a definition
suggests that the relation of language and culture has been studied from a variety
of disciplinary and methodological perspectives. Linguists will ask the question:
How are people’s perceptions, beliefs, values encoded in the linguistic sign, i.e.,
how do the signs that people use reflect what people perceive, believe, what they
are able to mean and the meanings they are able to communicate? Scholars in
pragmatics will ask: How is cultural meaning constructed pragmatically by speak-
ers in a communicative situation, i.e., how do they know how to evaluate the social
situation in which they find themselves and act appropriately? Sociolinguists and
linguistic anthropologists will ask: How is culture co-constructed by participants
in interaction, i.e., how do they read one another and know how to play the social
game? Literacy scholars will ask: How are language and culture affected by com-
munication technologies, be they the pen and paper technology of print culture or
the computer technology of virtual culture, i.e., to what extent is the medium itself
the message and how does technology shape culture as it purports to merely trans-
mit it? Critical discourse analysts will ask: How are traditional views of language
and culture, including the definition given above, put into question nowadays
32 Claire Kramsch
Taking language as cultural semiotic, this section considers the advances made
in recent decades in three major areas that illuminate the way culture is encoded
in the linguistic sign and its use: language and thought; language, cognition and
emotion; and language and embodied knowledge. These areas of research fall
roughly under the concept of language relativity.
Research on language relativity, that studies the way the language that peo-
ple use shapes the way they think, has picked up since the nineties in Linguistic
Anthropology with the work of Lucy (1992), Gumperz and Levinson (1996),
Slobin (1996), and more recently Lera Boroditsky (2003) and Guy Deutscher
(2010). While Whorf claimed that speakers were prisoners of the grammatical and
lexical structures of their language this strong version of the linguistic relativity
hypothesis has now been rejected and researchers tend to align more with Sapir’s
more moderate statement : “Language is a guide to social reality … it powerfully
conditions all our thinking about social problems and processes… The ‘real world’
is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group. No
two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the
same social reality. The world in which different societies live are distinct worlds,
not merely the same world with different labels attached.” (Sapir 1949: 68–69). This
weaker version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is now non-controversial (however,
see McWhorter 2014 for a recent critique) and is researched in Applied Linguistics
under three different aspects: semiotic relativity, linguistic relativity and discursive
relativity (see Kramsch 2004).
Language and Culture 33
1.1 Semiotic relativity, or how the use of a symbolic system affects thought
This aspect of language relativity draws on the insights of Soviet psychologists like
Lev Vygotsky . According to Vygotsky, a semiotic system is both linguistic sign
and cognitive tool. By learning to speak and to communicate with others, children
learn to think, by first internalizing the words and thoughts of others on the so-
cial plane, then making them their own on the psychological plane. According to
Vygotsky and sociocultural theory (SCT), a community’s culture and an individ-
ual’s mind are in an inherently dialectical relationship as semiotically organized
functional systems (Vygotsky 1978; Wertsch 1985). Lantolf (1999) describes the
process of cultural acquisition in children as follows: “during ontogenesis the bio-
logically specified mental endowment of children is shaped in specific ways once it
interfaces with cultural forces as children are apprenticed into their native culture”
(Lantolf 1999: 30). Cultural development here is taken to mean socialization into a
given social group, be it the family, the school or the sportsteam.
In second language acquisition (SLA) research, the enthusiastic embrace
of SCT by one of SLA’s most prominent scholars, Merrill Swain, in the nineties
(Swain 2000) constituted a sea change in the way SLA was conceived. Notions
such as ‘comprehensible input’ (Krashen 1982), ‘interaction and negotiation’
(Long 1980) and ‘comprehensible output’ (Swain 1985), that had nothing to do
with culture, gave way to concepts such as ‘internal speech’, ‘zone of proximal de-
velopment’, ‘scaffolding’ and the ‘help of more capable peers’. This raised the possi-
bility that children’s speech and cognition were shaped by those of cultural others
(Lantolf 2000; Lantolf & Thorne 2006). The question arose then as to whether
second language learners can appropriate for themselves the culture of the native
speakers of that language (Lantolf 1999). As long as culture acquisition only means
the ability to momentarily see the world through the eyes of a native speaker or to
occasionally behave in ways that conform to native speaker expectations, culture
acquisition should be a desirable goal of language learning. As Lantolf shows, lan-
guage learners are able to adopt the conceptual metaphors of native speakers, for
example, they can be taught to say in English “Thanks for your time”, and “I want
to respect your privacy”. But they might have quite a different view of time and
privacy from native English speakers. Indeed, if culture is, as Lantolf writes, draw-
ing on Clifford Geertz, “an historically transmitted semiotic network constructed
by humans and which allows them to develop, communicate, and perpetuate their
knowledge, beliefs and attitudes about the world” (1999: 30 my emphasis), then
non-native speakers by definition cannot have this semiotic network transmitted
to them historically since it is, as Geertz calls it, a “system of inherited concep-
tions” (Geertz 1973: 89). However, they can gain secondary access to it and make
it their own in a manner that will be different from that of native speakers.
34 Claire Kramsch
tax a “death tax” will lead citizens to vote against it, because, after all, it is not fair
to tax people for dying. As citizens of our languages, we must be aware that words
don’t change meaning on their own; they can be made to change meaning in order
to arouse different emotions and thus serve different political interests through
discourse.
to the current sloganization of political and academic life. Kress (2010) identifies
three principles of sign-making: “1) that signs are motivated conjunctions of form
and meaning; that conjunction is based on (2) the interest of the sign-maker; using
(3) culturally available resources”. (p. 10). He defines culture as follows: “Culture,
in my use, is the domain of socially made values; tools; meanings; knowledge; re-
sources of all kinds; society is the field of human (inter)action in groups; of ‘work’
or practices; of the use and effects of power” (p. 14). Heller, Holborow and Kress
use a critical approach to discourse phenomena that links the motivated sign to
cultural and political interest and power.
In sum, various fields of research related to Applied Linguistics have made it
easier in recent decades to conceptualize how culture is encoded in the linguistic
sign and its use. Culture is linked to language in three major ways: semiotically,
linguistically, discursively. Language does not determine our cognition nor our
emotions; torture means torture in any language. But by calling it something else,
like “enhanced interrogation technique”, one can change the degree of the cogni-
tion and the intensity of the emotion triggered by the words. Not in a deterministic
way, and not in the dictionary meanings of words, but in the enunciative choices of
speakers and writers and in the affective, social, and political meanings they assign
to these words. It is to these enunciative choices that I now turn.
requesting that a roommate clean up the kitchen, or apologizing for not returning
a book to your professor on time. This methodology was the object of frequent
adjustments, first requesting an open-ended utterance, then providing a contex-
tual constraint in the form of a third rejoinder. But still the DCT left too much to
the imagination of the respondents and their idiosyncratic understandings of the
situation to be able to provide a reliable measure of pragmatic competence pegged
to “the native speaker”.
The work of Deborah Tannen (e.g., 1984, 1993) was the third sociolinguistic influ-
ence on the way Applied Linguistics approached culture. In Framing in Discourse
(1993), following the UC Berkeley tradition pioneered by Fillmore, Chafe,
Gumperz, Ervin-Tripp and others, Tannen showed the importance of cultural
frames to understand events. These “frames of expectation” were studied as social
roles (e.g., what men and women expect of each other in conversation) or char-
acteristics of a conversational style (e.g., California vs. New York Jewish style).
Researchers gained access to these invisible frames by eliciting narratives from
pictures or videos without words, such as Wallace Chafe’s The Pear Story, that
make visible a storyteller’s assumptions about stories and their culturally-specific
expectations about human motives and actions. Tannen found that, when they
Language and Culture 39
retold the pear story, her American informants paid much more attention to the
cinematic aspects of the video than her Greek informants, who focused more on
evaluating the motives and intentions of the characters and on passing moral judg-
ments.
However, there were researchers who showed that such mappings of language
on to culture were too simplistic and had to be studied with much greater differ-
entiation. In her work on bilingualism, Ervin-Tripp, who had studied the different
completions of the same story told by bilinguals in English and in Japanese to
find out whether the differences were attributable to their different cultural back-
grounds, had found that there was much more deviation between and within na-
tional groups than expected (Ervin-Tripp 1973).
Even the monolingual norms needed differentiating. Like many psychologists
interested in bilingual children, Ervin-Tripp used a range of tests to measure the
relation of language and culture in bilinguals, e.g., Thematic Apperception Tests,
storytelling, word associations, sentence completions, semantic differentials and
story completions. She studied the difference between foreign born Japanese of
the first generation of immigrants to the U.S. (the Issei) and second generation
Japanese-Americans (the Nisei) and their distance from American norms, dis-
tance from Japanese norms, and relative dominance of the two distance scores.
She found that, when asked to give associations of words in Japanese, both Issei
and Nisei gave associations typical of women in Japan; but when speaking English,
the Issei gave typically American associations. For instance, Japanese women more
often say “what I want most in life … is peace”. Americans say “… happiness”
(p. 69). But the Japanese responses were very much dependent on how long they
had lived in the U.S., how many Anglo-American friends they had, whether they
read American magazines, to what extent they kept the two cultures separate or
not, and, ultimately, whether they could picture for themselves what a “typical”
Japanese or American response would be. The over-all effect was that content
shifted with language for both groups.
In sum, culture as enacted pragmatically by speakers and writers has been
studied by psycho- and sociolinguists who have been quick to map the pragmatics
of one language on to psychological and social characteristics of groups that speak
that language. The dissatisfaction with such structuralist approaches to pragmatic
cultural variation has prompted some researchers in recent years to turn to post-
structuralist approaches that explore how language and culture co-construct each
other in intercultural encounters.
40 Claire Kramsch
If the main insight gained by research on language and culture in the 80’s and 90’s
was that culture was expressed by participants in and through the very structure of
spoken interaction, the post-structuralist turn in the last fifteen years has focused
the attention on its co-constructed nature and on the non-structural aspects of
this co-construction, such as identities, ideologies, timescales, and orders of in-
dexicality.
In the 80’s and 90’s, applied linguists were interested in finding out how inter-
locutors in conversation express social and cultural identities through their use
of language in social contexts and how they reproduce well-bounded ethnic, fa-
milial, and social cultures. They drew, for example, on Gumperz’ (1982) notion
of contextualization cue and its role in cross-ethnic communication, on Ochs’
study of family narratives and their role in reproducing a family culture of “father-
knows-best” (Ochs & Taylor 1995), on Goffman’s (1981) notion of facework and
social positioning, and on Tannen’s notion of conversational style (1984) in the
reproduction of cultural networks. In the last 15 years, with globalization, applied
linguists have had to deal with the multilingual uses of language in multicultural
contexts and the co-construction of multiple, changing and sometimes conflic-
tual cultural flows. They have explored the code-switching and code-meshing
practices of bilingual youngsters in classrooms, in large urban centers and online
exchanges (Canagarajah 2011), the transidiomatic practices of transnational im-
migrants (Jacquemet 2005; Lam 2009) and the rise of hyperreflexivity (Clark &
Dervin 2014) in an era of superdiversity. In so doing, they have broadened and
diversified their research methodology.
For example, while Gumperz (1982) was intent in cataloguing the different
types of codeswitching and in identifying their discrete pragmatic functions in
countries which traditionally keep different linguistic codes strictly separated,
Canagarajah (1993), studying the codeswitching in ESL classrooms in Sri Lanka,
went beyond a structuralist typology. He recognized that, by allowing in the
classroom code-switching and even code-meshing, i.e., the seamless blending
of several languages as if they were one, the school was preparing the students
for the hybrid culture of the real world outside, where such translanguaging is
common currency (Garcia 2009). Going beyond Gumperz’ typological interest,
Canagarajah not only observed secondary school teachers in the classrooms but
discussed the teacher’s views on codeswitching after each lesson. He found that
codeswitching fulfilled both microfunctions, such as classroom management and
Language and Culture 41
With performativity, time has re-entered the picture of a field that tended to consid-
er culture only spatially or geographically. In anthropological research, the vague
44 Claire Kramsch
notion of ‘culture’ has given way to culture as historicity and subjectivity (Hanks
1996). Researchers, inspired by insights from complexity theory (Blommaert
2005; Larsen-Freeman 1997), cultural memory studies (Halbwachs 1992; Wertsch
2012), and metasemiotic studies (Silverstein 2004), look at the data with increased
reflexivity and attention given to the subjective perspectives of both researcher
and researched. For example, Kramsch and Whiteside (2008), using a complexity
theory framework, examined the exchanges between Yucatec Maya immigrants
and Asian shop owners in the Hispanic district of San Francisco and showed that,
rather than performing expected linguistic and cultural identities, these immi-
grants operated on multiple timescales and positioned themselves subjectively in
multiple ways so as to get along with others and avoid the police. Samata (2014),
drawing from cultural memory theory, conducted interviews with immigrants to
the UK who had no or limited knowledge of the language of their parents, but a
strong affiliation with the culture of their parents’ language. She too takes into ac-
count history and memory in her analyses and reflects on her own subject position
as a multilingual and multicultural researcher. In his study of classroom discourse,
Wortham (2006) draws on Silverstein’s (1976) metasemiotic theory to illuminate
the “metapragmatic models” or characteristic types of students and their actions
and relationships to other students, that persist over the school year and influ-
ence how students perceive themselves and are perceived by others. They affect to
a large extent what and how they learn the subject matter. These metapragmatic
models of the self play a crucial role in the material construction of cultural mean-
ing, i.e., in the repetitive or iterative suspension of time in the construction of
social reality. Performative models of culture enable us to envisage another rela-
tion to time and space, one based not on linearity and simplistic views of causality,
but on the emergence of phenomena nested one in the other, and on the “layered
simultaneity” of timescales (Blommaert 2005, Ch.6) .
In sum: The performative turn in the study of language and culture within a
post-structuralist perspective does not, as many have feared, transform culture
into a merely discursive process, open to all the relativity and subjectivity of indi-
viduals’ verbal utterances and with no clear agreed upon social boundaries. It does
underscore the man-made nature of culture, its historicity, its disciplining power
and its power to impose on a social group definitions of what is taken-for-normal,
the shared understanding of people and events. But at the same time, the perfor-
mative shows that the very political forces that have constructed culture can also
be used to deconstruct and reconstruct culture in different ways. Performativity
can indeed be seen as transformativity (Pennycook 2007: 77).
Language and Culture 45
In this section I consider the uses of literacies (written, print, online, multimodal)
in shaping what we call culture. Literacy education and writing technology, inheri-
tors of a print culture that started in the 16th century and that ever since has raised
the interest of scholars in literacy issues such as genre, style, register, and norms
of interpretation, has provided the foundation for applied linguists’ understanding
of language and culture (e.g., Kress 1996). Indeed, the structuralist approaches to
language and language use discussed in previous sections of this paper come from
an intellectual tradition steeped in print culture. For example, the very scholarly
culture that enables applied linguists to transcribe spoken data and analyze and
interpret them from a structuralist perspective belongs to an eminently literate
culture that has academic legitimacy only to the extent that it is literate, not oral.
Similarly, the application of Hallidayan systemic functional linguistics to teach
register and genre (e.g., Cope & Kalantzis 1993) and to reshape foreign language
and literature curricula along genre-based principles (Byrnes & Maxim 2004) is
in line with an academic culture anxious to maintain the boundaries between oral
and literate speech genres and their use. Such policing of literacy practices has
been the hallmark of national cultures eager to use print technology to distinguish
educated from less educated citizens, and to inculcate in the young the political
and moral values that go along with such technology.
Enter online technology and the Internet. Applied Linguistics has been slow
to research in any critical depth the effects of the new technology and its uses in
language education (however, see Kern 2014; Kern & Malinowski forthcoming;
Kramsch 2009,Ch.6; Malinowski 2011, Malinowski & Kramsch 2014). The pres-
sure to prepare language learners for the “real” world of online communication
has led most researchers to consider the computer as just another tool for the
realization of print literacy goals, including the communicative competence that
is taught in instructional environments. The virtual culture of computer-mediated
communication has been viewed by many as the ideal instructional environment
to implement the post-structuralist turn in the teaching of language and culture.
This environment matches the communicative goals of language education: com-
munication with native speakers, interaction with other non-native speakers, col-
laborative learning with more capable peers (Swain 2000), learner autonomy, and
the learning through tasks that mirror those of the real world. All this at the click
of a mouse. But the new environment also ushers in: a decentered view of the
individual at the mercy of public opinion, distributed cognition and the danger
of plagiarism, multiplicity of identities and a distinctly addictive reliance on the
judgment of others, a blurring of oral and literate genres (e.g., email, Skype, blogs),
and in general, a reshuffling of the usual axes of time, space, and reality (Kramsch
46 Claire Kramsch
2009,Ch.6; Kern & Malinowski forthcoming). The very technology that promised
to give all learners access to any foreign culture and its members is exacting its
own price: shallow surfing of diversity instead of deep exploration of difference,
leveling of aspirations and expectations, bullet-like ability to process information
but loss of the ability to follow a complex argument, amazing ability to multitask
but limited ability to problematize the task and question the question.
The political and ideological issues raised by each new technology, from print
culture to multimodal forms of expression (Kress 2010) to the virtual culture of
the Internet, have been addressed by Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). I men-
tioned in the previous section the poststructuralist turn in Applied Linguistics,
inspired by Foucault, that problematized culture by asking about the historic
conditions of possibility of cultural phenomena, and the subject positions of the
producers, reproducers and transformers of the discourses that constitute culture.
In the same way as cultural theorists are rethinking concepts such as historical
tradition and authenticity in an era of simulacrum and second life, so are critical
applied linguists starting to question the authenticity of cultures in the age of the
hyperreal and the virtual (e.g., Blommaert 2010). For this they need another kind
of CDA than the one pioneered by Norman Fairclough (for a post-modern cri-
tique of Fairclough, see Blommaert 2005, Ch.2). They need to draw on complex-
ity theory (e.g., Larsen-Freeman 1997; Morin 2005) and ecological approaches to
language and culture (Kramsch 2002).
In Chapter 6 of his book Discourse. A critical introduction (2005) titled “History
and Process”, Blommaert recounts how, in preparation for a workshop on “Frame
and Perspective in Discourse” held in the Netherlands on the 60th anniversary of
the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, the participants had been handed the texts of various
speeches made on the occasion and were asked to subject them to various forms
of discourse analysis. Blommaert was able to show how the events themselves had
been entextualized in different ways and how each of these texts was operating on
various timescales: the time of the uprising itself, the time of the Allied invasion,
the time of the Soviet restraint, as well as the present time in which most Western
narratives follow the U.S. American interpretation, heavily tainted by a Cold War
rhetoric that, as present events suggest, has not died down since the official end
of the Cold War. All these timescales operate in what Blommaert calls “layered
simultaneity” (p. 130). He writes:
We have to conceive of discourse as subject to layered simultaneity. It occurs in a
real time, synchronic event, but it is simultaneously encapsulated in several layers
of historicity, some of which are within the grasp of the participants, while others
remain invisible, but are nevertheless present… People can speak from various
positions on these scales. The synchronicity of discourse is an illusion that masks
the densely layered historicity of discourse (pp. 130–131).
Language and Culture 47
Thus, while the actual workshop took place in 2004, the participants positioned
themselves on different timescales, some more global, some more local, associated
with different memories and anticipations of the future, within the various dis-
courses surrounding the historical event called “the Warsaw uprising”. This way of
reading texts as entextualizations positioned on different timescales and in differ-
ent orders of indexicality offer a more complex reading than traditional CDA and
can serve as a model to analyze online texts with their equally complex relations
to time, space and reality.
In sum: The relation of language and culture in Applied Linguistics is insepa-
rable from the issues surrounding the use of language technologies. The print cul-
ture of the book, the virtual culture of the Internet, the online culture of electronic
exchanges all have their own ways of redrawing the boundaries of what may be
said, written and done within a given discourse community. They are inextricably
linked to issues of power and control.
The last twenty years have seen the remarkable growth of fields related to Applied
Linguistics, that all deal with language and culture: Communication Studies (in
particular, Intercultural Communication); Linguistic Anthropology; Cognitive
Science; Sociolinguistics. What are the unique insights from Applied Linguistics
on the relation of language and culture?
Under globalization, language education has to face two major challenges in its
relation to culture. The first is political. Since the global crisis of capitalism in 2008,
the increased competition for economic resources of all kinds, and the growing in-
equality around the world, culture wars have been exacerbated, and the symbolic
power struggles have become more pronounced. As Holborow writes: “Ideology
can be more usefully understood as a jigsawed, inconsistent representation which
may find its expression in language but which is also distinct from it; it is a one-
sided set of ideas, articulated from the interests of a particular social class, which
may be part believed and part rejected and whose degree of acceptance rests on its
relationship to real-world events” (Holborow 2012: 41). Applied linguists return
to Volosinov’s idea that “differently orientated accents intersect in every ideologi-
cal sign. Sign becomes the arena of class struggle” (Volosinov, cited in Holborow
2012: 37). Holborow stresses “the multiaccentuality of the ideological sign, and
the sedimentation of different evaluative accents, which lie at the root of language
48 Claire Kramsch
change and of the generative nature of language itself ” (p. 37). Following the idea
that the linguistic sign not only represents and performs reality but constructs it as
well, Hasan (2003) points to the semiotic struggle as to who will define and control
reality itself. Research in language and culture increasingly consists of demystify-
ing ideologies and giving a distinct political turn to social and cultural events.
In terms of methodology, we see applied linguists drawing on Critical
Sociolinguistics and paying more attention to social and historical, transnational
and global phenomena to explain the link between language and the larger cultur-
al context (e.g., Blommaert 2010; Jacquemet 2005; Pennycook 2007), even when
they deal with such educational issues as the learning and teaching of foreign lan-
guages (Kramsch 2014).
The Internet revolution has transformed the way symbolic systems define real,
hyperreal and virtual cultures. While the real is still viewed as the domain of au-
thentic, historically based cultural tradition, the hyper real of the Egyptian Sphinx
and pyramids in Las Vegas, or the avatars of Second Life detach the real from its
geographical place and make it into a culture beyond cultural reality. But virtual
environments, like Facebook or Second Life, by recreating reality make it possible
to question traditional culture. As the cultural geographer Nezar AlSayyad writes:
It is not that the real is being breached by the virtual. Rather, the virtual opens up
multiple ways of engaging with the real by questioning, breaking, and negotiat-
ing realities. And therein lies the challenge to tradition. As the different virtual
contexts we have examined, from Tiananmen Square to Second Life, create their
own realities, the virtual enables us to develop a more sophisticated theory of the
real (Al Sayyad 2014: 217–8)
The virtual makes it possible to think that there are multiple forms of, as well as
ways of engaging with, realities. The Tahrir Square revolution was not created by
Facebook, but Facebook and other technologies gave people new ideas of what
was possible.
In terms of methodology, applied linguists are starting to question the limi-
tations of computer-mediated communication to achieve intercultural under-
standing. Telecollaboration, chatrooms, long-distance language learning, blogs,
have undoubtedly increased the volume of verbal exchanges, and thereby facili-
tated the acquisition of linguistic structures, but it is not clear how the discourse
of virtual exchanges gets translated into the increasingly diverse forms of com-
municative competence required nowadays on diverse levels of reality. Given
the enormous pressure exerted by the computer industry on publishers and
Language and Culture 49
educators alike to use the new technologies in the classroom, applied linguists
up to now have been more eager to justify the use of this technology than to
explore its limitations. This is a wide open field of research begging to be further
theorized and conceptualized.
We have seen the growing tendency among applied linguists to draw their theo-
retical inspiration from scholars not only in the social sciences but also in the
physical and the human sciences, out of the need to take account of the multi-
lingual, multimodal, global conditions in which language is learned and used.
Ecological approaches have drawn on phenomenologists like Merleau-Ponty
(Kramsch 2002), complexity theory has used concepts from dynamic systems the-
ory ( Larsen-Freeman & Cameron 2008), poststructuralist approaches have built
on philosophers like Derrida, Foucault, and Butler (McNamara 2012). This has
led to research questions that are broader than the positivistic, objective ques-
tions asked of the data in most of the social sciences. One of the methodological
consequences of a poststructuralist approach to language and culture in Applied
Linguistics (with its principles of emergence, its time scales, fractals, and nonlin-
ear developments) is that fieldwork has to take place over longer periods of time
(various local timescales) to analyze repeated acts (thickening) of identification
(positionings) by others and self. For instance in Wortham 2006 one girl, Thyisha
came to be identified as “outcast” and one boy, William as “unpromising boy” in a
classroom over a whole academic year. The researcher was able to document the
process by which metapragmatic models of the two students emerged and were
constructed and solidified over time through repeated speech acts whose aggre-
gate effects could not have been predicted.
Another methodological consequence of a poststructuralist approach to the
study of language and culture is the more frequent use of literary works as sources
of data. Language memoirs, novels, and autobiographies are being used to support
the exploration of language learner subjectivities (e.g., Kramsch 2009; Pavlenko
2005). However, all these texts are studied either in English or in their English
translation. The problem presented by multilingual literature, i.e., texts that code-
switch among various languages without necessarily providing any translation, is
one that applied linguists have not yet explored, probably because most of them,
even though they are more often than not bi- or multilingual, publish exclusively
in English. But texts that systematically code-switch between many languages re-
quire, in order to capture their full cultural and emotional impact, a reader that is
equally familiar with these languages. This in itself is a real world problem that still
awaits serious applied linguistic research.
50 Claire Kramsch
Finally, the study of language and culture in Applied Linguistics must take into ac-
count the dramatic rise of the field of Intercultural Communication (ICC). Known
first as “cross-cultural communication”, this field was in the fifties affiliated with
anthropology, then in the 80’s and 90s it became dominated by the comparative
and positivist paradigms of cross-cultural psychology, in which culture is defined
solely in terms of nationality and one culture is compared with another using some
generalized constructs (e.g. Hofstede 1991; Triandis 1990). Despite the work of so-
ciolinguists like Ron and Suzanne Scollon (1981) who used the term ‘interethnic’ to
characterize cross-cultural communication between Athabaskan-Canadians and
Anglo-Canadians, and despite their insistence that ICC had to do with culture as
discourse (see their 1995 book Intercultural communication: A discourse approach),
the field of Intercultural Communication has not until recently been concerned
Language and Culture 51
with language. However, in the last two decades, applied linguists have begun to
bring ICC within the purview of Applied Linguistics . In foreign language learn-
ing and teaching, “intercultural learning” has become an influential approach to
language education, based on the idea of “mediation between cultures”, “personal
engagement with diversity”, and “interpersonal exchanges of meaning” (Liddicoat
& Scarino 2013: 8). A special issue of Pragmatics edited by Meeuwis (1994) ad-
dressed the notion of culture and cultural difference. A new Routledge book series
Language and Intercultural Communication features the work of applied linguists
(Clark & Dervin 2014; Dervin & Risager 2014; Sharifian & Jamarani 2013) and
the Routledge journal Language and Intercultural Communication is hospitable to
scholars from Applied Linguistics. In this respect, we note a convergence between
the concerns of ICC studies and Applied Linguistics that can benefit both fields
with regard to the study of language and culture.
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Author’s address
Ms. Claire Kramsch
1201 Shattuck Avenue
Berkeley, CA 94709
USA
[email protected]