|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
WHEN Claire Kramsch was asked to contribute the first article on language acquisition and language learning to appear in the MLA volume Introduction to Scholarship in Modern Languages and Literatures, she expressed satisfaction in the opening lines that the field of second language research had arrived. The MLA volume, a collection of essays on the state of the art of literary and linguistic studies, had opened its pages for such a contribution in the second edition, in 1992. As much as this invitation was an acknowledgment of a field that had not received much attention by foreign language scholars until the early 1980s, it represented a remarkable recognition of Claire Kramsch as one of the field’s leading scholars and its most articulate spokesperson. The article became an impressive assessment of the developments and achievements of second language acquisition (SLA). It was to be read both as a tool for language specialists and as an introduction for the scholar of literary and cultural studies.
Claire let the reader know that she was aware that this article could not have been written without the expertise of other scholars in the field. She mentioned, in particular, Carl Blyth, Heidi Byrnes, and Janet Swaffar. The gesture of appreciation was generous yet reflected the intensive give-and-take among second language scholars very well. When Claire was singled out for the ADFL Award for Distinguished Service in the Profession in 2000, she was celebrated for her innovative vision of language learning as a dialogic venture between cultures but also for her untiring support both of individual colleagues and students and of the many institutions, groups, and projects in the profession. Characterizing her achievements according to her bibliography, which includes such path-breaking works as Context and Culture in Language Teaching (1993), Language and Culture (1998), and a plethora of much quoted articles, would be incomplete without mentioning her more than one hundred talks and keynotes at conferences, workshops, seminars, universities, and schools in the United States and abroad. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the foreign language profession is unthinkable without Claire Kramsch as a fulcrum of innovative pedagogy and scholarly self-reflection.
Since 1992 Claire has updated her assessment of language acquisition and language learning several times in edited books and contributions to journals, in particular to the Modern Language Journal. She devoted special effort to defining SLA as a crucial component of applied linguistics, thus raising its professional profile and providing arguments for its inclusion in the academic agenda of foreign language teaching. This step, inspired by the work of the American Association for Applied Linguistics, was laid out in her article of 2000, “Second Language Acquisition, Applied Linguistics, and the Teaching of Foreign Languages,” in a concise and helpful presentation. Her definition of SLA as a “theory of the practice of language acquisition and use” (322) resonates with the current wave of professionalization among language teachers, which is increasingly used as an argument in the fight for the retention of foreign languages as an academic pursuit. Claire’s arguments for professionalization are closely intertwined with the current drive for content-based language teaching. Given the precarious state of foreign languages in academe, the activation of the cultural roots and conditions of language learning—the central issue of Claire’s work—becomes a key in the fight against Berlitzification, that is, against making language instruction a mere remedial service.
Coming from literary and cultural studies, I am not particularly qualified to judge the practical applications of Claire’s definitions and findings for everyday interaction in the language classroom. Yet I might not be the only one to place her inspired analysis of the cultural basis of the engagement with a foreign language above her professional achievements, an analysis that is closely connected with her ability to propagate it as a powerful device to guide students through some of the rough terrain of language learning.
Shifting the methodological reflections from teaching to learning has been done periodically, usually when instructional dogmatism becomes overbearing, as it tends to, yet Claire has succeeded in infusing this shift with a cultural reflection of the learning situation itself that leads directly to a strategy of grasping and overcoming the linguistic chasm. Hers is the most extreme strategy of contextualizing language learning: delineating the cultural ambiguities in which “most of the difficulty of learning a foreign language lies,” as Ellen Crocker and she say in the introduction to the much lauded textbook for managing conversations in intermediate German that Claire edited with Crocker, Reden Mitreden Dazwischenreden:
In the foreign language, students often feel they know all the dictionary words and all the rules of grammar necessary to receive messages or to get theirs across, but they are not sure they understand the individual, social, and cultural value of these words. [. . .] How can I answer appropriately if I don’t understand the context of communication? What I need as a foreign language user of the language are tools to deal with the ambiguity of the social context, plans to prevent or repair breakdowns in communication. (iv)
Claire illustrates this problem by describing a poignant moment of irritation in communicating in the workplace. What seems obvious to the speaker is not at all clear to the others in the conversation. The moment of irritation becomes the moment of what I would call cultural apparition or, more modestly, linguistic self-reflection. When Claire takes issue with the assumption that one language is essentially (albeit not easily) translatable into another, she does not dismiss the usefulness of functional and pragmatic structures of learning. Rather, she stresses the possibilities of using interest in the difference—différance—of cultural attitudes for a deeper grounding of linguistic competence. Accordingly, we need to realize that we are reproducing our culture in every word and gesture and that we can actually become more creative in doing this through the encounter with the other language. Such creativity is strongly inspired by the reflection of otherness. However, this otherness is different from the theoretical otherness in English departments; it is an encounter of our students with a whole other world of words, gestures, and strategies for coming to terms with reality. Moments of cultural apparition make us not saints but members of foreign language departments. And Claire gives us the confidence that by building on them we are not just teachers or discussion leaders in an annex of the academy but educators right at the center of its operation.
These remarks on her intervention in the classroom must suffice to indicate that hers is less a theory than a conceptual framework for foreign language instruction. In her volume Context and Culture in Language Teaching, Claire argues against the belief that language teaching is the teaching of forms to express universal meanings. Instead she proposes the notion of conflict in our multicultural world as the basis for engagement with a foreign language. If the conflictual perspective is eliminated and text and context separated, the pedagogical momentum disappears. Here is where other scholars of language acquisition disagree with Claire’s argument. In an exemplary exchange in the ADFL Bulletin in 1995, Heidi Byrnes and Elizabeth Bernhardt formulated arguments against the conflictual and for the consensus position. In the words of Byrnes, the heart of the matter is articulation in foreign language education, and the term articulation means “specifically a coherent sequence of events that is presumed to lead to the most beneficial learning environment for the student over a number of years” (14). In contrast, Claire stresses the need for and productivity of “teaching the conflicts,” using an argument of Gerald Graff about education in the humanities: “The goal of dramatizing and clarifying conflicts should not be confused with disputation, or with getting warring factions talking to one another. The important thing is that students get a sense of what is at issue in the cultural controversies they have a stake in” (“Embracing” 11).
This argument is intellectually convincing and fully in tune with the pedagogical impulses that have trickled in from the wave of cultural studies in the 1980s and 1990s. Whether it can sustain more than a broad-based instructional strategy and shape specific positions beyond the dichotomies of “intellectual exercise versus untidy reality, the privileged few versus the student masses, lofty talk versus action on the ground,” as Claire delineated them, (“Reply” 17), is beyond my competence to judge. However, I don’t know of anyone who has done more than she to overcome the chasm between language pedagogy and the cultural studies movement, turning the mutually protective strategies into sources of curiosity, inspiration, and innovative learning.
Let me turn to the developments in the field of German, in which Claire has been working primarily at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California, Berkeley. This field underwent a substantial transformation in the 1980s and 1990s, when the traditional discipline of German or Germanics, grouped around the centrality of language and literature, was opened toward the study of German culture in general as “German studies.” In those years the crucial methodological paradigm that helped install German studies as an extension of the traditional discipline was interdisciplinarity. Under the broad roof of the German Studies Association, teachers of history, literature, and political science tried to establish new ways of interacting in their scholarship and to attract a new generation of students and academics to a more inclusive understanding of German-speaking societies. And yet, when we conducted a workshop session at the 1989 meeting of the association that was to set parameters for a genuine American approach—“Germany as the Other: Towards an American Agenda for German Studies” (see Trommler, Geyer, and Peck)—we learned that the rethinking of the encounter with the foreign culture would not work without a simultaneous rethinking of the mediation of language and the appropriate teaching of this mediation. This was the moment when I became aware of Claire’s important reflections on the cultural predisposition of every act of mediation. It was not just the realization of the cultural sources for language instruction that she helped articulate but also the reverse stimulation of linguistic devices for the teaching of cultural competency.
Creating a genuinely American form of Germanics, one that also reflects the distance to Germany and German culture and does not reproduce the idiosyncrasies of German Germanistik, presupposes a clear reflection of the engagement with the other language. American Germanics needs to make creative use of the process of reading the foreign text. The authentic-text movement was to transform the mediation between the authenticity of the foreign text and the reader’s preconceived perceptions into an important catalyst of cultural competence. The instructional strategies, which Claire, Swaffar, Howard Lee Nostrand, and others had proposed in regard to reading as an active construction process, helped integrate the teaching of language into the discourse on foreign culture. Without substantially subtracting from communication-oriented language pedagogy, these strategies showed not only how much cultural baggage the reader brings to an encounter with a foreign text but also how that baggage could and should be used. Claire’s article “Literary Texts in the Classroom: A Discourse,” in the Modern Language Journal, was an eye-opener for me, especially when I tried to assert the extent to which a student in a course on German culture, history, or Landeskunde, or even in an ordinary language or literature course, is already fully engaged when entering the process of reading a foreign text.
As the breathtaking events of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the unification of Germany confirmed the need for interdisciplinary approaches in order to do justice to the many facets of those developments, the interest in the linguistic aspects of German studies subsided substantially. For a short while, language enrollments soared without much pedagogical interference. The disheartening statistics of foreign language enrollments in the mid-1990s, however, gave those who had worked in revamping language pedagogy a special boost. Since then, both irritation and cooperation between language pedagogues and promoters of cultural studies have grown. It was not without satisfaction that Claire, in her “Second Language Acquisition,” pointed to the fact that almost twenty percent of all job openings in French, German, Italian, and Spanish in the MLA Job Information List in the late 1990s required a knowledge of SLA, foreign language pedagogy, foreign language education, or applied linguistics. While the concept of cultural studies has brought new interest and resources to the engagement with foreign cultures, its effectiveness in foreign language departments must be strongly tied to the realities of language instruction, lest it draw the academic operation into the monolingualism of the English departments.
Claire provided an important argument for the self-confidence of the nonnative teacher and speaker of German when she asked, “Who owns the German language?” in Die Unterrichtspraxis in 1996 (“Wem gehört”) and answered that it is those who use it as a catalyst for an intercultural dialogue across national and disciplinary boundaries. Her empowering the nonnative speaker corresponds with the underlying philosophy of German studies regarding the so-called Americanization in the 1980s and 1990s of the study of German culture and literature. She helped shift legitimacy to the nonnative teacher and reflection on the cultural preconditions of linguistic communication.
None of this, of course, pertains only to German. As a guest columnist in the May 1997 issue of PMLA, Claire generalized, giving her piece the title “The Privilege of the Nonnative Speaker.” Still, she pursues her argument with French and German examples, reflecting her own background in these two cultures, French being her first. Colleagues ascribe the ease with which Claire projects the cultural dimensions of language learning to her linguistic existence in three languages. “Users of tongues other than their own,” she remarks, “can reveal unexpected ways of dealing with the cross-cultural clashes they encounter as they migrate between languages. Their appropriation of foreign languages enables them to construct linguistic and cultural identities in the interstices of national languages and on the margins of monolingual speakers’ territories” (368). Such ease might be unattainable for many of us more pedestrian language learners. But it encourages us to raise our heads above the notion that those born in Grenoble or Freiburg have a grasp of French or German that no one can match. She encourages us to put our distance to good use, reflecting back on a better understanding of the linguistic culture on the American continent.
Claire’s ability to sensitize us to the great intellectual and cultural experiences of linguistic foreignness rests on a deep understanding of each language. But she does not shy away from criticizing growing monolingualism. This criticism, I think, makes her a great contributor to the Modern Language Association and its constant negotiations between English and foreign languages, between monolingualism and multilingualism. Claire is a worthy winner of the ADFL Award for Distinguished Service to the Profession not least because she is such an effective spokesperson for the intellectual weight of foreign language pedagogy in the academy. She not only provides us with better methods of teaching foreign languages; she also gives foreign languages a better standing in the academy.
Crocker, Ellen, and Claire Kramsch. Reden Mitreden Dazwischenreden: Managing Conversations in German. 2nd ed. Boston: Heinle, 1990.
Kramsch, Claire. Context and Culture in Language Teaching. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993.
———. “Embracing Conflict versus Achieving Consensus in Foreign Language Education.” ADFL Bulletin 26.3 (1995): 6–12. [Show Article]
———. “Guest Column: The Privilege of the Nonnative Speaker.” PMLA 112 (1997): 359–69.
———. “Language Acquisition and Language Learning.” Introduction to Scholarship in Modern Languages and Literatures. 2nd ed. Ed. Joseph Gibaldi. New York: MLA, 1992. 53–76.
———. Language and Culture. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998.
———. “Literary Texts in the Classroom: A Discourse.” Modern Language Journal 69 (1985): 357.
———. “Reply to Heidi Byrnes and Elizabeth B. Bernhardt.” ADFL Bulletin 26.3 (1995): 17. [Show Article]
———. “Second Language Acquisition, Applied Linguistics, and the Teaching of Foreign Languages.” Modern Language Journal 84 (2000): 311–26.
———. “Wem gehört die deutsche Sprache?” Die Unterrichtspraxis 29.1 (1996): 1–11.
Trommler, Frank, Michael Geyer, and Jeffrey M. Peck. “Germany as the Other: Towards an American Agenda for German Studies: A Colloquium.” German Studies Review 13 (1990): 111–38.
© 2002 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
|
|---|
|
|
|
