Carl Blyth @ Columbia University - Languaculture: From language-and-culture to language-as-culture
Transcript from youtube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8R_FRClXrg
so um thank you all for showing up today friday afternoon and thanks again to the language uh columbia university language resource center for inviting me here to give this talk on language culture i did not change the title i know some i've been to talks and people changed it at the last minute i was going to but i got on the plane and here's what i know i'm going to tell you to talk about language culture but the sub title here is actually important from language and culture kind of an additive approach an additive conceptualization of what it is that we do to a more synthetic kind of approach and you may think that well i'm a language teacher i'm a language specialist therefore i'm going to be preaching to the converted everybody here all probably believes in the importance of culture in language teaching but maybe by the end of the talk you will think well you really are doing something a little bit more specific which is the intersection of both language and culture so um i maybe may or may not be speaking to the converted because language teachers as i said typically agree that language and culture are inseparable you can't learn the language without learning the culture that kind of is a cliche but in actual practice we meaning language teachers separate the two of these all the time we reify the separation in the names of our own courses language courses and culture courses it's in catalogs in all kinds of university programs but i also want to situate my talk here today in kind of a moment a moment of crisis of the humanities we've been talking about that and with with several people here today and my own um searching really for a more integrative approach because i think the time has come that we need to sep uh we need to we need a more integrative approach so um let me start with this book um bit by uh durvan and lidico that just came out linguistics for intercultural education and there's been a a recent spate of books on kind of similar topics this came out in just two years ago and they say despite a growing national consensus surrounding the need to develop globally competent college graduates there is a lack of agreement about how to achieve this goal in many higher american higher education institutions currently many institutions including my own university of texas at austin are caught in a paradox they're promoting the internationalization of their curricula while simultaneously reducing foreign language culture requirements that's happening everywhere along similar lines surveys indicate that global studies majors and study abroad programs are growing very rapidly at american institutions but unfortunately those programs are increasingly conducted in english and offer only a minimal contact with the foreign language and culture so many foreign language programs must accept i would say part of the blame i know i'm blaming the victim but the state of affairs is such that we have sometimes i believe diminish the own impact of of language study by emphasizing what i will claim is a structuralist knowledge at the expense of intercultural or cross-cultural competence current instructional approaches lead students and perhaps more importantly administrators at universities to view foreign language education as the memorization of static structures instead of a critical and this comes from their i'm citing them a critical understanding of humanity's semiotic capacity for negotiating meaning with members of other cultures that's pretty big but that's my point i don't think that we're getting that message across in addition research suggests that the field of modern language studies has long relied on a nationalist monolingual paradigm that equates a national identity with proficiency in a single standard language so the french speak french and the chinese speak chinese but these structuralist approaches are not only i'm going to claim essentialists but they also separate language from its cultural context and often reinforce our students own negative foreign stereotypes so there's another book that came out just last year and it came out uh and it looked like the exact intersection of my interest developing critical language pedagogies in higher education and i'm in the process of writing a book and i thought uh oh i'm in trouble this book has already been written right um no uh it is a really interesting book but it's really more about teacher cognition how how teachers are understanding how the two fit together then it is actually um a fully developed plan for a pedagogy but here's what i want to talk about today and i'm calling it my agenda because it really has been my thought process for the past couple of years what is our object of study and i mean our object as language instructors what is it that we want our students to study so i've been asking myself that what is it what is my own personal object of study how can i define and i'm going to say i think it is langua culture for me it's really the intersection of the two how can i define that how can i then teach that and what have i learned from what i've been trying to do for the past couple of years i'll be sharing that so let's get to it my object of study then um this book was very important to me a couple years ago i stumbled across this book the language parallax linguistic relativism and poetic indeterminacy by paul friedrich who is an anthropological linguist at uh university of chicago was uh at the university of chicago and the notion of parallax is captured here so it comes actually from astronomy and it really simply means that an object an object of study looks different depending on your perspective okay so many people who come into languages have different in the french word formation a kind of a background you come from literary studies you come from linguistics you can come from pedagogy you can come from now media studies it gives you a different viewpoint on the object of study okay um i should mention before i go on that the notion of parallax of course resonates then language itself is a parallax okay but the other important point about this book is paul friedrich as a linguist he's also a poet so that's a parallax too he was looking at language kind of the referential function of language meaning but also the poetic function and he mentioned something really that caught my attention he said you know as a poet and as an anthropologist trying to write ethnographies to cross cultural boundaries the hardest part was always the poetic realm and he said he makes a statement he said the the areas of greatest divergence and greatest differences between languages and cultures are in this poetic dimension i thought i don't know how we can prove or disprove that assertion but it's really an interesting one so a way of grappling with this parallactic nature of language is to talk about it in terms of autinomies or dichotomies which is a way of grappling with how inherently complex languages okay so we have synchrony and diagram so a moment you can still look at language at a moment in time or over time you can look at it as a categorical rule it always applies or it's a variable rule it depends it's a product or a process it's long by our updated version of competence and performance the last the long incompetence being the abstraction of a language versus its actual practice so this got me thinking what is what is the student perspective when they look at the object of study what does it mean to them not only language and language learning and i think after being in this profession for a number of years now and asking my students this question i'd say they think of it and by the way i teach a lot of seniors so people who are majoring and they come to the end of their studies and they'll say language is a system of words and grammar rules so they separate the lexicon from what they are now understand to be grammar it's arbitrary it thinks so sue it's arbitrary it's closed it's static it's conventionalized in the sense that it's a shared object um but it's not made up on the spot it's conventional okay it has a meaning and it requires lots of memorization that's the bad part okay so i actually play this game with them a little psycholinguistic experiment i've been doing this for a number of years ask them okay for their associations they write down on the piece of paper the term with grammar and and since this is a romance language that i'm teaching it's about verbs and conjugations that's what grammar means to them obviously this depends this game would depend on what language that they're studying um and then there is uh commas and semicolons and punctuation that comes from their high school grammar teacher usually i might follow that up and ask them about that if you ask them about you can play that game with communication interestingly that triggers so that's brings the word language they associate language with communication not necessarily with grammar but understanding of course but what's really interesting when you're looking at this kind of data is not just what's there but what's not there and what's not there and i've been doing this for several years now they don't mention people they don't mention context they don't mention culture and this after what 20 years of communicative language teaching and we're trying to contextualize yes okay so i have to um as i said starting out blaming the victim and i'm part of the problem too uh this this little anecdote comes from a textbook that i actually wrote with some graduate students it's an intermediate textbook postcafe in french and so this is a a communicative context from my own textbook they were talking to each other a hand goes up and says how do you say a cheerleader in france in france so i thought ooh teachable moment i said you don't you wouldn't say it because that doesn't exist it's not part of the cultural frame like okay but you told me i'm supposed to do this stupid activity i'm supposed to tell this other person what i did i went to a football game and there was a chill how do i say cheerleader in french so i started talking about well it depends you could circumlow cute because if you're talking to a french person and they don't have that they said but i'm not talking to a french person i'm talking i know that's the problem you're talking to an american and they already know what a cheerleader is and that this is a problem so that's the point of some of these communicative activities is they're still highly contrived and they reduce the complexity of the context so i started thinking how can i def how can i teach language culture but more specifically how can i define it in order to be able to talk to my students about it so let's go back to friday he says uh in another an article and i'll just read through this a domain of experience that fuses and intermingles the vocabulary semantic aspects of grammar and the verbal aspects of culture both grammar and culture have underlying structure while they are constantly being used and constructed by actual people on the ground i will refer to this unitary but at other levels internally differentiated domain or whole as lingua culture i've actually shifted now there's variation in language lingua lengua i don't use the term lingua culture because it for many people it brings up connotations of linguistics and that's not what i'm going or concretely greek lingua culture rural southern vermont lingua culture and so forth okay so that was a night that was the end of the 80s and then this book was published in 94 called language shock understanding the culture of conversation it was popularizing the notion of language culture michael agar is an ethnographer who was worked for most of his career at the university of maryland and he writes language in all its varieties and all the ways it appears in everyday life builds a world of meanings so he puts it in a more kind of uh informal way than than friedrich but he emphasizes the notion of meaning coming into language as a universe of meanings the lengua in language culture is about this course not just about words and sentences and the culture and language culture is about meanings that include but go well beyond what the dictionary and the grammar offer but one of the major points of this book of agar is to argue against the legacy the problems are raised by a so-syrian notion or understanding of language and so of course socio was the seminal figure in linguistics who changed the field and he writes cecile laid the foundation stones for modern linguistics he was one of the key figures who sculpted the modern era out of the 19th century but he set up the circle around language when he threw out speech in favor of language long so the abstract system so the metaphor of the circle he drew the circle and that's what we do with fields we say this is the boundary of the field here's what's inside it i'm going to call this language and the other stuff no okay so fast forward jim landoff is a well-known figure in second language acquisition coming from a socio-cultural perspective and he said you know if we talk about proficiency we have to talk about lang culture so he writes about the circle and again this is the notion this is agar's notion of the social drawing the circle he said the circle compelled us and he's talking to language specialists to think of language as only what exists inside its boundaries what's outside the circle is something other than language for example culture little wonder that language learning teaching and assessment have been understood as something apart from learning teaching and assessment of culture okay and my journey then took me to kieran resigner also at the same year published as land off and she's published several books she's a a danish sociolinguist and has written several books about language and culture pedagogy queer what's important is the subtitle from a national to transnational so moving away from a monolingual national paradigm french for the french looking at languages as transnational in this era of super diversity and what was important for me though is that recigor takes this universe of meaning and divides it into three domains the first domain is some semantic and pragmatic meaning which usually correlates with the study of anthropology and linguistics so talking about the here and now pointing like how many windows are in the room that's referential meaning the identity dimension because every time you open your mouth and say something people situate you in a social universe so who are you where are you coming from so forth sociolinguistics and the third one the poetic dimension which is literary criticism aesthetics poetics um okay so okay that's what i mean by language culture so the how do i teach this and the notion of the pedagogical imperative why should i care about teaching this comes to us from the mla report uh published in 2007. now they did not use the word language culture but i think that they actually should um so they say that the goal now of higher education foreign languages should be translingual trans cultural competence and this has been a game that applied linguists have been playing now for a couple of years so we went from intercultural competence to translingual competence to symbolic competence we keep talking about competence but my point is i think that the object of study has remained the same so it's not really had that much impact on the field the practice of the field but there's this uh quote here that i pulled out that the point we should and language programs should systematically teach differences in meaning mentality and worldview it sounds very superior warfare as expressed in american english and in the target language okay so i think that the mla report was trying to now in my vernacular erase the circle i think that's what they want us to do but if you do that all hell breaks loose and um again let me cite landoff he says once the circle around language is erased and we begin to think in terms of language culture rather than language and culture meaning becomes far more prominent than it is inside the circle this has consequences for how we conceptualize learning and proficiency outside the circle the domain of language culture entails knowledge of different concepts and how those are encoded in such features as metaphors lexical networks lexical grammatical structures schemas and the like so he goes on says we're not teaching this currently we're really not doing this this book was also finally bringing us up to that um just a couple of months ago it's also important for me because it it has first of all the word pedagogical imperative it's important for us to actually take these kind of interesting ideas the theoretical ideas but turned them into a practice and the notion of research and practice of course here he uses the sociocultural term or the vygotsian term praxis so they're in a dialectic but what i took from this book is actually the notion of concept-based instruction so let me turn now and get a little pedagogical how do i teach language culture okay so i've adopted concept-based instruction and here abstract concepts service the basic units of instruction so instead of always starting from form and thinking about today i'm going to be teaching narrative past tenses what you really want to think about teaching is aspect as spectral differences or the concept of narration or even perspective taking so which are much more cognitive in orientation so a lot of this by the way is borrowing heavily from cognitive linguistics so these abstract concepts such as aspectual distinctions or narration must be verbalized in one's own words it doesn't help to import a bunch of gobbledygook from linguistics what they do is memorize that but they don't understand it so it's important that they verbalize it and then one step further is that they have to be i like this word didacticized um and there are different ways to do that one of the ways that they talk about is to actually turn it into a diagram or some kind of an image so also they talk about it in terms of cbi concept-based instruction is some kind of a sequence so we present the concept they usually don't understand it at all because it's an abstraction and then we have some kind of activities that are dialogic not a dialogue in a textbook right so because meaning is dialogic it's a very bactinian in that notion so they understand the concepts by trying to verbalize it to somebody else in small groups and then we have lots of activities where they try to internalize it that is apply looking at using real language and apply these concepts okay and then the whole process is very iterative because i just recycle all of these concepts throughout the remaining remainder of the semester so what does that look like so here's one of our concepts we're talking about the notion of semiotics and i introduced this famous taxonomy of signs i distinguish the difference between an icon an index and a symbol i think it's important that students of language at a higher institution know this um so on the on the on the left here the meaning is so we see we have two columns right it means male man different okay and female so forth but they mean the signs mean differently right so icons are a relationship of similarity it looks like the object that it means here the object is a relationship in a relationship of contiguity or proximity autonomy and then of course the famous symbol of socio arbitrariness okay so we talk about that how would that apply we also talk about here's then going into the next stage of dialogue remember their ideas they had to turn it into something that meant that was personal for them here's somebody trying to explain the notion of complexity to their neighbor and each of the it doesn't show up very well but it says infinity infinity infinity so it keeps going and finally trying to internalize this we actually have a text different kinds of text so texts are are not just written they're also oral we're looking at multimodal texts and i want them to exemplify what is it is that's an example of what an icon or complexity or what are the concepts and then explain how it applies very important obviously is since i'm using real language data is to contextualize everything because language is for me context so this is how it works i'm teaching this course right now not today actually since i'm here in new york but it's called the introduction of french linguistics so caution i'm talking about a senior level course and people are after the in the q a will probably ask me so how can this be adapted to lower level well that's that's the work for all of us to do but anyhow this focus today is on a senior level class i'm teaching them these different concepts i start off by asking for their definitions of language and culture which is really interesting i would whatever level you are i think you should ask them what do you what do you think those two words mean to you and then i ask them for their language culture biographies and everybody shares their language culture biographies with each other and then we have a couple of three weeks where i present the leading concepts then we use those concepts to understand semantic and pragmatic meaning social meaning poetic meaning and then they do their final projects so let me show you what this looks like for the most part a language this is then a very small sample of a definition for the most part a language is grammar structure in a set of words so we have that dichotomy grammar words or the lexicon used by people that is mutually intelligible between a group of individuals so this is pretty intelligent using the criteria mutually intelligibility pretty good um language culture biography i'll just give you a little snippet here they're usually about two pages long my mother was raised speaking french as a first language my father wasn't i was raised speaking english in my family's home and aside from exposure to certain words of endearment and phrases that became a part of my mother's ideolect oh okay so he's had some kind of maybe linguistics i don't know but that tells me something it was only through extended family gatherings that i came into contact with the language my father's linguistic upbringing in mind were pretty similar at least one one of our parents spoke french but the family was but the language was really spoken at home leaving us in early life to pick up what we did through extended family gatherings my father never became bilingual like my mother he does have a decent handle on how to curse though as though many english-speaking canadians do and so we learn a lot of information from this this is just a paragraph of two-page lingua culture biography and he knows how to curse very well in quebec french quebecois french okay so here are the concepts that i'm introducing and not just for this course but i think they're actually important for language learning and the challenge is to figure out how we can import them and turn this into a pedagogy right from the very beginning complexity because languages are inherently complex prototypes cultural frames semiotics or semiosis formulaicity and acceptability so let me say really quickly about what those concepts are when i say complex so almost all of my students use the word system when they would describe these are seniors describing language they say language and culture or systems but none of them say complex systems and that's important to me so a complex system has these five traits it's open to external influence it's heterogeneous yes they all be made birds may be uh the same species but they're differences between the birds it's dynamic the flock of birds always is changing without a leader it's still it's changing and it's adaptive so if some change happens over here it's going to be a trigger an adaptation over there and it's non-linear meaning you've heard of the butterfly effect effect so a small change can trigger have huge consequences in the system prototypes the next thing they need to understand is we're pulling conceptual information out of our minds and the the information is always structured okay so here's an obvious prototype for of a bird and it's based then an on um cultural experience so languages can never give you synonymy because you always have different cultural experience okay so get over that there is no synonymy in languages okay cultural frames going back to my student who wanted to say cheerleader i wanted to tell him what i was trying to say is if you say cheerleader then you have to evoke the entire frame of a football game so cheerleaders are only understandable if you understand everything else here okay so in communicating cross-culturally or interculturally you may want to evoke a frame that gets close to that okay a french football game let's see semiotics we were moving away from social's arbitrary signs to the notion of semiosis which is the process of always making meaning in the moment and this of course is charles sanders purse who was writing it was contemporary of sosu but had a much more expansive vision of semiotics than socio which was focused on the most conventionalized and linguistic signs so here's a very important quote nothing is a sign unless it's interpreted as a sign so you have to have people in the picture science don't exist without people formulaicity i'll give you a second to read that collective grown okay so it all turns of course on the formula or the collocation or the fixed expression of mistaken identity identity so for syllables anemone so it works the formulaicity is like the key to native likeness and so a lot of times at this level my students are writing grammatical french but it's not it's not formulaic french okay so that's really important for them to understand when they're looking at language cultures it's close but it's not exactly okay and finally the last concept instead of grammaticality i emphasize acceptability and since i teach a lot of students who are actually spanish speakers learning french i'm in texas after all i have lots of great um anecdotes that they give me about this notion of acceptability i one kid this past semester who said he uses the two form with one set of grandparents and the usted form with the other and he said uh he actually made a mistake when he was six years old with his maternal grandparents he used the wrong form and his mother said don't do that that's and he said but that's what i used with with the other set she said well they're crazy don't do that so the point being that you need to negotiate language use and it changes it's highly context variable okay so as i said i do an iterative application of all of these six concepts through different kinds of meaning different kinds of text and through all of them i'm trying to point them to the fact that there are patterns at all these different interacting levels which is complexity so lexical patterns how they choose a word is it positive or negative the notion of valence grammatical patterns what kind of sentential frame discursive patterns how do you want to structure your argument interactional patterns and conceptual patterns it's all connected so at this point they're totally overwhelmed by all this this is pretty heavy so let me show you actually how i work on this um so for a lot of the semantic pragmatic stuff we've been using futura which comes to you from mit it's an open educational resource and since i'm the director of the center for open educational resources i want to use as many open products as possible it exists in other languages besides french and english and it's grown we actually now have 20 years of of the data between this is essentially a first one of the first and most well-known examples of telecollaboration so uh mit students and the french version of mit students at acode pudding technique and now it's grown to many other french universities it turns out that students at mit do not represent america okay which is a very important point they are two groups of people who are talking from different cultures but they do not have to rep they don't have the burden of representing an entire language or entire culture that's taken off the table right away but there are cultural patterns that we see right away so this of course is the the game that i was playing earlier on with my students with the associations these are all associations with individualism these are all french associations with individualism so even add an e it changes the valence it changes it goes from highly positive to highly negative so we kind of just now scrape the data off of the web and we dump it in something called a word cloud and we can start to look at this and now here it starts to take shape a prototype this is a this is a category uh individualism then you can see you can paraphrase it as the expression of the self's unique i don't know uniqueness you're free to express yourself a couple of things this is somewhat diffuse in that there's not just one there's several different semantic factors coming here if you compare that to the french boom egoism so this basically means selfishness in french i think it's a much so it's a false cognate actually they're learning um so not only is there one central member of the prototype egoism and you also have then egoistan iguacentrism so if you're just looking at that egomorphine it gets even bigger so it has a shape um the french if you dig down deeper and look at the different things of different words you find that the americans are able to uh conceptualize individualism as just the self the french itself in relation to somebody else it's a relational concept so they always when they talk about the individual it's always with they have words like society which never appear in the in the data cloud for the americans these lexical patterns are related to grammatical patterns because uh the americans this is uh ten years of data i ran a little analysis they talk about they use the word i and the french rarely use the the pronoun okay that jumps out at you uh it's highly significant when you run statistics on it um and it gets to the point when i've taught with this uh actually with chuchua where the america about midway through the semester the french say you know you americans are so arrogant you're talking about yourself all the time it's all about you and the french are doing their french thing which is tes antites santes and they're saying they're saying this is what i hear you say and however on the other hand and and they also are using impersonal expressions it is important that one must so they're communicating but they're completely out of sync um and the the the fringes i was saying complain that the americans are arrogant but the americans are saying the same thing of the french because of course how dare you talk down to me i'm you know you're pretending that you're some kind of professor just tell me about yourself okay very different patterns of argumentation um i was giving a talk in in france a couple years ago and a french professor said he said so they're doing they're doing philosophy class that's how we're trying to do it exactly that um this also correlates them with interactional patterns so because the americans are making statements about themselves it's not just i i what i think i believe i so yes the the french when they do say i they say things like ge ponce jacqua epistemics but the americans talk about how they feel and the french never do in this context so the french are saying i'm so surprised i'm so curious i'm so shocked and the french are it is important to remember that one must okay so those are the kinds of activities that we're doing to understand social uh to understand semantic and pragmatic meaning let's go to social meaning which is where we're finishing that right now and when i started this unit this was of course published october 5th this appeared and it was perfect because it was actually this article was written by a linguist here in the new york area and he talks about the notion of indexicality and the social meaning of accents and so forth and in in september and early october it was good to have a new york accent apparently in iowa it's not so good anymore so which is great because that also shows the dynamics of social meaning but this is exactly what they don't have they don't have the experience to understand all the social complexity of language so what i have to get inventive and one of the things that i'm using is this film bonker bed cup anybody know this one okay this is a great film um well no it's not a great film it's a good film for teaching social meaning embedded in a context and the context here of course is the competition between ontario and quebec and instead of talking about this let me uh jump out of this and show you what i do oh here we go so let me show you the play you just a little bit of the trailer of bunk up bed cup and it appeared in 2005 i for believe martin ward solving his latest case is nothing compared to getting along with his new partner he's from quebec okay so that was the first time they met each other david ward he's the anglophone and david bouchard says david so he's already mocking him right from the very beginning by saying okay i can do an anglophone accent too so there's so much language play and it goes so quickly that we'll go through it scene by scene and talk why did he do that and what does that mean i'll find you okay you've seen enough you get you get the point so this is a buddy film a cop film these are two guys who are thrown together and have to be partners but what i have my students do is actually look at all the code switches here they have a they have difficulty understanding the dialect the french dialect can significantly different than than european varieties of french so but but they can handle code switching and so we talk a little bit about the context the stereotypes this is not authentic data this is a representation of what's going on that's an important point for them to understand so but as they start off using language it's very stereotyped and it becomes much more negotiating their developing relationships so that's so social what i mean by looking at social meaning let me go back uh and end now kind of come back to um poetic meaning and for poetic meaning which we'll be starting next week for the next um for november i'm using so i'll give a little shout out to this is something um this is an oer that was actually produced by uh joanna looks at cornell university and her ada her idea was to um begin some kind of literary or critical analysis of some kind of poetic dimension from the very beginning and she said that really doesn't exist in most textbooks today unfortunately and so her idea it's a really interesting conceit in that she said you know what i want them to do is not necessarily look at canonical literature but i want them to look at everyday discourse that has literary qualities which is much more accessible to them so she's looking at things off the internet or she's uh looking at ordinary conversation that has interesting metaphors by the way this exists right now as a product on google docs so anybody can download it and use it turn it into a word document go in and change it that's the point of open and we're trying to train other people and how to play along with this uh how to play the game of open educational resources and we've now developed a website called foreign languages and the literary in the everyday so it's not just for french it's a construct that kind of works for all kinds of languages um and so i'm we're working with coral and there's another national foreign language resource center at arizona circle that is working with us and they're doing german and spanish so we hope to have more and if you're interested in more information i can talk about this later on so one of the activities that i do um for this uh the poetic kind of um dimension is i have i give them various poetic texts this is a very famous poem by elua and what i'm using i'm also showing you another oer another open educational resource which is a tool for collaborative annotation markup you can take a text and this is available anybody can use this if you'd like it's a product that we developed at coral but it essentially turns the text into a space a space online so imagine all of your students marking up the same text together that's what we're doing it's collaborative annotation it's another tool for close reading of a literary text now that's the humanities right so anyhow what we see here is that we also it generates word clouds uh so lots of people have annotated this line this is the last stanza in the poem so it i can see at a glance where they're interested what parts of the text uh grab their attention and um i'll just show you go back into english so everybody can understand so this is a text that i did in demonstration with a couple years ago at a conference jabberwocky and so somebody underlines the word frumius vandersnatch and writes sophie i gave them all different names adjective from the verb to froome and so he's playing around obviously so somebody you can write back and say well so what does froome mean well it means to exhale sulfur duh of course okay so the point i'm trying to show here is that they actually mark it up and then talk to each other about their markups so what i do is i give the text liberte to different groups of interpreters native non-native mixed and see where the conversation goes because what this actually can do is you can produce a transcript of all the interactions that's what they actually look at is how they interpret poetics in the moment so what have i learned so far from trying all these ideas out i think it's really important that we create some kind of new meta language because we have a metal language a received categories of grammar that have been around for a long time but to get at the other dimensions we have to borrow from other fields from discourse analysis conversation analysis other different kinds of fields that are still new multi modality and so forth and there's a very it's a very it's very powerful to learn a term to name a term and this is many of my students when they're looking at the data and or whatever they don't see things and i think part of this don't have a label for some of the things that they're seeing so i know from my own experience and taking art history and i'm learning new terms whether it's italian or it's a french term or here the contrast of light and dark and then you say there it is there's clear obscure there it is i can start to see it i think they knew we need a new metal language and the other important principle that i've learned is i think language teaching should start with meaning not with form and this is huge i think um the problem that i think is that when you start with form you never get out of form you stay with form and that's linguistics you go from form to form to form to form there are no people there are there's no context it's just form so if you start with meaning then that means that you need to do a good job of really talking about meaning and that's where i think we need to do a better job i think it's important that we dissolve some of these dichotomies they're inherent in the way we talk about languages um but i've been inspired by a number of different people um leo van leer is one of my heroes and he talks about language and context he said no that dichotomy doesn't make sense it's all context you it's like an onion right that's his metaphor you keep peeling an onion down layer after layer and it's like oh wait a second this all layers it's just all context all the way down as he says but um diane larson freeman also talks about kind of dissolving dichotomies that have been around for a long time product versus process it's it's really more like emerging patterns all the time language is always emerging vocabulary versus grammar as my student said all of my students say that you have grammar and vocabulary it's more lexical grammar because words then trigger sentential frames they're they're always they fit together ah embrace reality so okay bone cup bad cop is not reality um and i'm using that and i put that in quotation marks and say this is a representation of reality but let's stop with um pedagogical materials that use actors at the beginning and it's all fake students know it's fake because reality is so much more interesting so i use as much ethnographic materials as i possibly can because they're rich i think we need to really do a much better job enriching the context my own textbook as i said at the very beginning has a lot of now i'm looking at and say well of course these so the contexts are so impoverished so let me give you um an example i think uh of a better of one of these attempts at a better con contextualization and this is actually from um you can see at the url this is that there's a method site a coral we've published uh and it has a unit on pragmatic so contextualizing language so this is what i mean by enriching a context whenever you communicate there's always a back story you have motivations and the person you're talking to have motivations and they're complicated and they may change so here imagine the following situation you have an important dinner to attend tonight you need to borrow your friend ana's car because you have wrecked yours the last time you borrowed it you put a small dent in it uh-oh uh you what do you want to say to her to get the car okay so this is not a dialogue he's just going to be given a task but i want you to watch unfortunately the the captions aren't working but it's only a minute so if you don't speak spanish that's okay we'll go over really quickly what this means so it's really important that i have this car for tonight not my fault not my fault so it's very safe your car with me is very safe um it's never my fault it's not it's not my fault there i have these accidents oh i forgot i talked over the last part he said me your car please okay so he was trying to say it but he doesn't have the skills yet to uh mitigate it so it's not terribly polite at the end so what we do is use these kinds of videotapes with them actually in some kind of more lifelike interaction and they can actually talk and listen to each other and say how was that as a performance um okay so the point being this is a more enriched context than you typically find in most textbooks okay so let me finish up here i said enrich context and the next thing is go meta that was actually meta we turned that into a meta activity by showing it to the students and then act asking them to kind of unpack it a little bit one of the things that i've been doing with a colleague in spanish is looking at kind of what would be called intercultural pragmatics so here is a native speaker of spanish from colombia and here is our american student and i am i won't play the videotape for you but you can see that what we're doing is we have them interact and actually have them talk about individualism or child rearing practices or whatever and we're looking for cultural divisions and divides and we're evoking cultural frames and then immediately after that we have them watch it again so this is them watching them right communicating and what i do is i ask ask them lots of targeted questions to get to prompt them so why did you smile and why did you nod and why are you doing that to get them to actually think a little bit about the process of communication that's what i mean by going meta and finally the whole point of my talk is integrating so let me end with um one of my a quote from one of my colleagues janet swaffart who taught for many years in germanic studies and janet wrote a really i think a great piece in 1999 so these ideas these are not brand new ideas none of them i'm quoting from many people um but she says foreign foreign language study is a discipline with four subfields language literature linguistics and culture that asks the question how do individuals and groups use words and other sign systems in context to intend negotiate and create meanings within this definition i'm not talking about linguistics alone i'm suggesting that our profession must derive principles of foreign language study from the expanded social core of language and communities and that's what i've been working on the goal of our discipline is to enable students to recognize the various intentionalities behind verbal and written text and to use language effectively to achieve their own purposes within a cultural community in quote so she wrote that in 1999 it was published in the adfl bulletin the case for foreign languages as a discipline it was republished the year later in the mla profession and i think um so we're still talking about that i can see that i think the field is moving towards this integration i think we are in um as i said at the very beginning kind of a historical moment we're losing enrollment we're losing faculty and so i know for my own department we are finally because there are only a handful of us now left standing in each of these fields we are finally beginning to work together so that's the positive note and so let me ask for all end with this the q a but i have to have a picture of my hero roman jacobson who started his career in literary criticism and then discovered linguistics but he was always a linguist as he said which meant to him a language lover they're all manifestations of this huge beast called language thank you you