Reading With My Eyes Open

Front matter

>= | Reading with My Eyes Open Embracing the critical and the personal in language pedagogy a

Gerdi Quist l ICI ARTS AND HUMANITIES PUBLICATIONS

Reading With My Eyes Open: Embracing the Critical and the Personal in Language Pedagogy

Contents

Acknowledgements Introduction

Chapter 1 Tensions Between the Old and the New: The Influence of Educational Ideologies on Language Teaching Introduction The Position of Language Teaching at University Classical Liberalism Versus Instrumentalism The Liberal Tradition The Instrumental Paradigm A Re-accentuation of Elements of the Liberal Approach Problematising Intellectual Engagement Conclusion Chapter 2 Culture Pedagogy: Some Theoretical Considerations Introduction Teaching Culture Views of Culture Knowledge in Culture Pedagogy: Examples of Dutch Textbooks Critique of the Nationally-Based Knowledge Dimension The Common European Framework Criticality and Culture: My Own Considerations Cultural Studies: Context Overview of Ideas of Cultural Studies in Culture Pedagogy Language in Relation to Culture Orientations Towards Language

Traditional and Linguistic-Oriented Approaches vi Reading With My Eyes Open

Index

167 168 171 172

176 179 189 195

Acknowledgements

I owe my thanks to many people who in various ways have contributed to the making of this book. First of all I should like to thank the students who participated in this particular study and gave me kind permission to use their words. In addition my thanks are due to the students who I have taught since, because their engagement helps me to continue to learn and develop.

I am also very grateful to many of my colleagues and friends for their encouragement and insightful comments. In particular I would like to thank Cathie Wallace, John O’Regan, Alison Phipps and Theo Hermans for reading earlier versions of the study and providing in-depth and detailed feedback, and Jane Fenoulhet, Cristina Ros i Solé and John Took for reading the manuscript. Their sharp observations and critique greatly contributed to the final version of this book.

I am especially grateful to Kimbal Bumstead for granting me permission to use one of his art pieces for the cover. His work based on personal relations, intimacy, communication, responsibility, and tracing journeys chimes with the themes in this book.

Finally a very special thanks is due to my two sons Kim and Remi for continuing to inspire me with their own life journeys, and most of all to my husband Chris for providing me with time, space and all kinds of practical and moral support. Without their encouragement and love this book would not have been written.

This book is based on a classroom study exploring a particular intercultural approach to language teaching at university aiming to develop students into critical intercultural language users. I call my approach the ‘cultuurtekst’ - text as culture — approach, a term which I have borrowed from the Dutch literary critic, Maaike Meijer (1986). I had conceived of this approach as a result of reflections on my previous teaching, students’ engagements and the newly developing theoretical area of intercultural communication in language and culture pedagogy.

In this book I am mapping the territory of language teaching at university and coining new concepts on the way. As the study took me over 10 years to complete — with various interruptions along the way, it represents a professional journey as a lecturer of Dutch at one of Britain’s traditional universities at a time when ideas about language and culture pedagogy were developing fast. This has not been an easy professional journey; the pedagogy which I was developing at times met with resistance among the students and ran counter to language teaching approaches employed by colleagues at the institution where I worked. Moreover the data I collected, consisting of transcripts of my classes in which we discussed a particular text and interviews with students, were marred by ambiguities and if anything, seemed to point to a failure of my approach.

My initial conclusion therefore was that intercultural communication is infinitely more complex than a ‘cultuurtekst’ approach, or perhaps any other particular method of language teaching, can effect. Secondly, that attempting to develop students’ critical awareness and language competence would need an even clearer conceptualisation coupled with a more considered pedagogical approach.

Some years later — and this is where conducting this study over a longer period of time than initially anticipated has produced unexpected benefits - I looked at the data again. This time I looked at the data from an ethnographic perspective, and not with the idea in mind of how ‘successful’ the approach had been. Instead, I focused on what happened in the classroom, how the students engaged with the text and one another and what the significant dialogic moments in class had been. Something interesting emerged. In the earlier interpretation I had seen students’ interpretations of the text based on personal experience as a weakness; students had failed to analyse the text using the language of analysis based on concepts of culture and representation. Instead, it emerged that it was precisely the moments where students brought their personal experience and interpretation to bear upon the text that the most dialogic and intercultural moments occurred. These were the moments when students applied their ‘self’ to the text, where they tried to respond to the text and explain it to others - the moments when students were ‘struggling for meaning. As a result, I coined the phrase ‘being a text ethnographer’ to account for the way that students can engage critically and reflexively with a text from an ‘inside’ as well as an ‘outside’ perspective.

The study itself and the development of my approach was born out of dissatisfaction with existing instrumental approaches in language teaching which were — and indeed still are - prevalent in existing language materials and in many discourses surrounding language learning in general and in the field of Dutch language teaching in particular. Yet, I worked in a context - that of a Modern Language Degree at one of Britain’s traditional universities, where to a large extent traditional discourses about language learning were dominant. As a result there was a general assumption at the institution where I worked, that language teaching was synonymous with the grammar-translation approach, and language classes were strictly separated from the ‘content’ classes addressing ‘culture; which was generally conceptualised as ‘literature, or — occasionally - as film. The generally accepted aim of language learning was, and in some cases may still be, that of reaching ‘near-native speaker’ competence.

The tensions and conflicting pulls between these almost opposing forces and discourses within language learning form the background to this study. In chapter 1 I argue that neither paradigm in language education, i.e. the ‘traditional’ liberal humanist on the one hand and the instrumentalist on the other, can provide a satisfactory framework for language teaching in the context of a Modern Languages degree; a context, in which students are prepared linguistically, culturally and personally for the complex lives in an era of mobilities. Whilst neither paradigm is sufficient in its own right, I argue that one of the aspects of the liberal humanist paradigm, which is worth rearticulating for language learning, is its focus on criticality and intellectual engagement. However, the notion of criticality provided by that paradigm, the idea of taking critical distance to gain objectivity, provides a limited view of criticality. I point to

Introduction 3

Pennycook’s (2001) notion of ‘mapping discourses’ as an alternative view on critique to be taken in the language classroom.

In chapter 2 I further discuss the conflicting perspectives on the concepts of culture and of language that are often assumed in language learning at university. In discussing the relationship between these two I point to the dilemma language teachers face when wishing to emphasise complexity and transnational perspectives, whilst at the same time being charged with looking at the particularities of the language and culture being studied. I conceived of the latter as ‘national articulations’ in globalised discourses.

Chapter 3 focuses on the notion of intercultural communication and discusses three different approaches in language education: those of Kramsch, Byram and Guilherme. In discussing these approaches in relation to the framework of criticality and complexity set out earlier, I set out where and how I build on particular aspects within each of these approaches, including Blommaert’s argument for ‘boundary crossing’ in intercultural communication. Following Phipps and Gonzalez’s (2004) view on ‘being intercultural, I explain how the notion of ‘cultuurtekst’ provides a way of being intercultural and being ethnographic when reading texts.

Chapter 4 forms a bridge between the theoretical chapters and the discussion of the data. Here I set out the context of my study, the conceptual framework of my ‘cultuurtekst’ approach based on a pedagogy of heteroglossia and multiple discourses, the syllabus of the fourth year language class in which I adopted this approach, and the methodology of my study.

Chapter 5 looks at the data from two lessons out of the yearlong language course. In these lessons we discussed a particular text from Men’ Health, following the framework for analysis which I created based on the idea of ‘cultuurtekst. During the first lesson, we discussed the text at a ‘textual’ or ‘product’ level, looking at content and argumentation structures following a liberal humanist perspective of critique. During the second class we discussed the text at a ‘cultuurtekst’ level, creating a dialogic space in which the students started to engage in ‘mapping discourses. In looking at what different ways of reading the two perspectives on text yielded, it emerged that these two levels of text analysis are not easily separated. Even when looking at text at a product level, students ‘went beyond’ the text and engaged in critiquing the text for its ideological positioning. Equally, looking at the text as ‘cultuurtekst’ at times became confused with critiquing the text from the liberal humanist perspective, as not constituting a ‘good argument. The second lesson did, however, bring about much richer dialogic moments where students took on occasion an intercultural stance in engaging with the ideas in the text and with one another. The significant findings in these data were particularly how students brought their own experiences and previous knowledge to bear upon the text.

In chapter 6, the concluding chapter, I discuss the general findings of my study and I include interview data to see what approaches to text students had taken and to what extent they had used critical perspectives. I focus on two students in this chapter: Claire, who engaged readily with my ‘cultuurtekst’ approach and Sarah, who resisted it throughout the year. Whilst it might have been tempting to classify Claire as the ‘successful’ language learner, as she was reading ‘with her eyes very open, as she said in one of her interviews, it was in fact Sarah who made the biggest transformation as a learner, as she had to adapt her view of communication and language as a whole. She also provided me with insights into how prior views of communication that students hold affect their learning in class. Moreover, the interviews also showed that the rich moments and understanding of discursive mapping which had occurred during the class, were not necessarily transferred in their reflections on the course as a whole.

In this final chapter I also examine the tensions brought about by working with conflicting views of text, criticality and education embodied in a pedagogy which aims to emphasise cultural complexity on the one hand and cultural particularities, through the notion of “Dutch articulations; on the other. I conclude that these seeming incompatibilities are part of the every day realities of students anyway and I argue for positively embracing these tensions. A greater level of explicitness about the theoretical assumptions underlying language and culture will provide students with the theoretical tools needed to reflect on these tensions. I further point to the importance of engagement with personal experience in the language class. I argue for pedagogies of engagement rather than the purely rational and analytical. These are pedagogies where students can explore their own relations and sense of belongings in our globalised, complex and cosmopolitan societies.

Whilst this study looks particularly at reading texts, it is set within the context of a general language class and my proposals for future pedagogies assume reading is embedded in the interrelated network of other activities that take place in class.

It is through the self-examination aspect of my study - looking critically at my own practice - that new theoretical understandings emerged. However uncomfortable these self-examinations are, this book is implicitly also an argument for a pedagogy which not only encourages the learner to engage in self-reflexive activities, but conversely for the teacher to do the same.

CHAPTER |I

Tensions Between the Old and the New: the Influence of Educational Ideologies on Language Learning

At the start of this study, in the late 1990’s, language teaching at university seemed to be flourishing. Bailey stated in 1994 (p. 41) that language teaching at our universities is thriving because of the mushrooming of language courses at universities, mainly as an extra module available to students of different degree subjects at Language Centres and Institution Wide Language Programmes, and because of the increasing number of modern foreign language degrees where the curriculum displays a greater emphasis on language learning at the expense of literature.

Now, more than a decade later, the situation is very different. Instead, language learning is said to be in crisis. There has been a decline in recent years in the number of student applications for modern languages degree courses except for school leavers from non-state schools. The concern over these falling figures, together with concerns over the funding provision for Modern Languages prompted the Higher Education Funding Council for England to commission a review of language in Higher Education in 2009 to investigate the health of modern languages (Worton, 2009). Worton attributes the decline of students studying modern foreign languages in part to the government’s decision to make languages optional for pupils after the age of fourteen (Worton, 2009: 2). But, there are other reasons. Phipps explains the preference for non-language degrees by the fact that students are exposed to a utilitarian framework that makes a direct link between their decisions about education and the shape of the labour market (2007: 4). Despite marketing attempts by universities and other stakeholders to convince potential students of the pragmatic value of studying modern languages, students are still ‘voting with their feet, she says. In fact, it may be precisely the emphasis on gaining instrumental skills, which is counter-productive when it comes to considerations of employability. Canning (2009: 1, 2) argues that if university language departments keep on marketing themselves mainly in terms of providing the learner with language skills, employers will offer jobs to native speakers whose skills in that language are supreme, and in addition will have other skills than just linguistic ones. Canning makes a distinction between promoting languages as ‘skill’ and languages as ‘discipline; the latter giving learners ‘humanities type skills. He further cites Brumfit’s (2005) rationale for a modern languages degree as ‘giving learners the linguistic tools to behave as critical beings in ‘other’ cultures. For this intercultural understanding linguistic skills are not sufficient, but language graduates ‘should possess in-depth cultural insights’ (ibid. p.8). Phipps (2007: 35) also argues that the field of foreign languages has made a mistake in seeing languages in purely functionalist and employability terms rather than to embrace the insights of anthropological approaches to culture.

I add here my own voice of critique to the instrumental paradigm, and argue that both the humanities with its philosophical underpinning and focus on texts, as well as embracing anthropological insights to culture, can contribute to a language learning pedagogy for engaging as critical beings with ‘other’ cultures. Whilst I am not aiming to analyse the ‘languages in crisis’ situation, I do suggest that one of the problems with language study at university is located in the lack of status the subject has had and still has at university. I will turn to this below.

The Position of Language Teaching at University

When I started this study there was a large variety of pedagogies in language teaching provision in British universities, ranging from the traditional literarybased modern languages degree, modern languages degrees with an emphasis on Area Studies and non-linguistic degrees with language as an extra module, the latter usually provided through a Language Centre. Language teaching as part of a modern languages degree, whether provided by the departments themselves or by a Language Centre, took place as a separate educational activity with a different set of aims from the rest of the degree and carrying much less prestige. This lack of prestige was borne out particularly by staffing levels, terms of employment and hours allocated to language teaching within the curriculum as a whole. In 1992 Scott et. al. pointed already to the fact that the majority of language teachers were part-time and hourly-paid, and on temporary contracts. This situation does not seem to have changed. Teachers in Language Centres are still frequently on vulnerable contracts (Worton, 2009: 31). Whilst, in comparison with a decade ago, there is a tendency in departments to employ specialised language teachers, they are not part of the ‘academic staff; and as Worton says (p.26), are seen to provide ‘service teaching. Moreover, in many departments the tradition still persists of (junior) lecturers with specialisms other than language and no specific qualification or experience in language teaching, teaching language classes in order to fulfil their share in the teaching load of the department. This illustrates the view that is still common at some institutions that language teaching can be carried out by any intelligent native speaker with some sensitivity towards the language. When this is seen against the situation for other subjects, the likelihood of appointing nonspecialist staff to teach for instance a literature class, would be an extremely unlikely occurrence.

Whereas the curriculum for modern language degrees as a whole is changing - with the traditional literary degrees (although they still exist) giving way to contemporary cultural studies, including contemporary literature, film studies and Area Studies (Worton, 2009: 25), language teaching still remains separated from the rest of the degree in status and content. This separation is even starker now that instrumental approaches have been adopted.

Classical Liberalism Versus Instrumentalism

Until the shake-up of the Higher Education system in Britain, which started in the sixties with the expansion of Higher Education and which culminated in the early 1990s in the transformation of the former polytechnics into universities, the educational aim at universities had been firmly rooted within a liberal philosophy of education. The key pillars of this philosophy are the pursuit of knowledge and rational autonomy; the development of the individual student towards independence of mind applied within the confines of a body of knowledge established as ‘truth’ in order to advance the discipline. These classical Enlightenment ideals were emancipatory - both for the individual in his striving for betterment, and for society, although this emancipation served particularly the emerging middle classes in the 19th century where the discourse of rational argument and cultural discourse were developed in the coffee-houses in England as part of an oppositional stance to the absolutism of a hierarchical society (Eagleton, 1984: 9-12).

The traditional liberal paradigm, with its notion of ‘promoting the general powers of the mind’ (Robbins (1963), quoted by Dearing, 1997: 71), has come under attack from several angles. One of these criticisms relates to the exclusivity of Higher Education towards certain groups in society. This is also an issue of concern addressed by Dearing (1997) in his report. This concern may now seem superfluous, since, the last 20 years or so, the university system has undergone a huge increase in the number of school leavers going to university. Whether this mass expansion was due to an instrumentalist neo-liberal response to the need for flexible labour markets or out of a liberal concern with equality is of course debatable. Nevertheless, the traditional Russell Group of universities still admit a proportional higher number of students from middle class backgrounds in comparison to the so called ‘teaching universities. Criticisms have also been directed at the philosophical underpinnings of the traditional liberal humanist paradigm. Its notion of emphasising individuality, rather than seeing individuals as being rooted in society, and its notion of pursuit of ‘truth’ is one which does not fit in a post-modern era. Jonathan (1995: 75-91) points out that modern liberalism has become free from the social baggage and the emancipatory idiom of its classical origins and argues for an examination of the ontological and ethical questions which are central to the development of consciousness and to the relation between the individual and the social. She points to the theoretical inadequacies of a paradigm which aims to develop maximal individual autonomy of each, for the eventual social benefit of all. The causal connection between these (individual autonomy and a socially better world) remain unexplained within liberalism, Jonathan says, and do not provide a theoretical position to reconcile the “twin contemporary pulls of illegitimate value imposition and incoherent relativism. She argues for reconstructing the theory of liberal education within a social theory; reconstructing the concept of autonomy as a socially located value. The key issue which Jonathan points out regarding the apparent conflict of the development of the individual within the social, is one that is also relevant for language teachers. A concern with the individual finds resonance in a new development within language teaching where pedagogies are shifting attention from a fixed authoritative curriculum to a focus on learners’ identities and subjectivities (cf. Phipps, 2007; Fenhoulhet and Ros i Solé, 2010 and 2013; Quist, 2013).

As Apple (1990) points out, theories, policies and practices involved in education are inherently political in nature. Changes within the educational system thus rarely, if ever, come only from philosophical considerations, but are politically motivated. This was certainly the case in the 1980s when a huge paradigm shift occurred in education. At many universities education came to be seen in terms of a market philosophy: education as responding to economic needs. Education in the 21st century is now not solely described in terms of the development of the individual and rational autonomy. Instead, the need to fit in with the demands of a fast changing world and the importance of the global economy have started to define curricula. Dearing (1997) emphasised the need to extend the - what he saw as still relevant - liberal aim of ‘training the power of the mind’ to include the needs of the world at large.

The paradigm shift from a liberal towards an instrumental view of education has been particularly pronounced within language teaching at universities. The rationale for language teaching has therefore changed from a view of increasing knowledge about a culture and developing one’s critical and analytical ability, to one which is couched in a discourse which emulates such values as the need to regain a competitive edge, overcoming a shortage of skills, not losing business to competitors abroad and so on.

The impact of the instrumental philosophy on language teaching has been phenomenal, but not always in a beneficial way. In the next section I discuss the language teaching approaches at university within these two paradigms and evaluate their contribution to the educational aim of developing critical language users. I will look at their strengths and weaknesses and suggest that the implementation of communicative approaches - in their extreme form - have contributed to the lack of status of language teaching. I discuss the approaches in their most ‘pure’ form, although naturally one could expect that teachers ‘borrow from either paradigm.

The Liberal Tradition

Within the liberal tradition the aim of modern language teaching at university level was - and still is - both cultural and intellectual. Bailey (1994: 41) formulates it as instilling ‘an appreciation of foreign literature and language through a scholarly analysis of their content and structure. This is achieved through the study of ‘esteemed’ canonical literary texts of the past as well as a historical approach to linguistics.

Language teaching itself, within this tradition, has been modelled on the teaching of the ‘dead languages; as the classics were seen as the highest expression of the liberal philosophy (Bailey, ibid.). The rationale for teaching language was to contribute to its two important aims of developing the cultural and intellectual capabilities and sensibilities of students. Whereas language learning has never been seen as an important intellectual activity in its own right (outside the subject of philology or linguistics), there was a recognised academic element in the learning of grammar. The cognitive powers of the students were challenged by exercises in sentence parsing and translation of de-contextualised sentences - even if this resulted in artificial language use - in order to apply the rules of logic and show a thorough understanding of the underlying grammatical intricacies. The emphasis was strongly on grammar and the development of written skills - an oral element to language teaching was either non-existent or incidental. This is because communication had no role to play in the traditional liberal humanistic language curriculum; its rationale for language teaching is the teaching of logical thinking skills and an ‘objective’ way of describing reality. Interestingly, as Cope and Kalantzis (1993: 3) point out, this traditional curriculum of prescriptive grammar has mistaken, even deceptive, pretensions to the timelessness of the classics. In ancient Greece and Rome the use of grammar was applied to the social context, forming an integral part of the teaching of dialectic or rhetoric. The classical language curriculum thus has a pragmatic communicative origin and a communicative function, which was never followed up on and which diametrically opposes the methodologies based on teaching a ‘dead language’

The second aim which informed the teaching of language was the access it provided to cultural products by exposing the student to ‘good’ language use and developing an aesthetic appreciation of language, through the study of a canonical body of literary work. This embodied the liberal humanist principle of language as striving for human perfection and beauty based on the Enlightenment ideas about the interpretation of the concept of culture and a wider epistemology. ‘Culture’ within this tradition encompasses elements of aesthetic and spiritual development (Williams, 1976, 1983: 90) which are enshrined in the valued canonical body of artistic - mainly literary - products of that society. This view pays homage to Matthew Arnold’s (1869, 2006: 40) definition of a study of perfection. It moves by the force, not merely or primarily of the scientific passion for pure knowledge, but also of the moral and social passion of doing good. In addition, this epistemology contains within it a belief in the rational autonomous subject who can use language to control meaning. Language offers endless opportunities to describe a reality which is located outside language itself. There is a belief in the ‘true’ and ‘real’ self and the universality of language. I will discuss this further in chapter 2.

One will not find Arnold’s view of culture and its moral good quoted in departmental aims and objectives at universities. Nevertheless, the tradition of literary degrees espouses the core of these values, which were up until recently widely accepted at many universities and still inform departmental courses, although this is more likely to be the case at pre-1992 Russell Group universities. At many of these institutions students studied a canonical body of works to ‘sustain a moral criticism of the world’ and to recognise the ‘little knots of significance in order to make sense of the world out there and to make ‘distinctions of worth (Inglis, 1992: 220). These liberal values are also reflected in the approach taken in studying canonical works, approached from a strong belief in the authority of the writer, rather than the poststructuralist emphasis on reader interpretation.

It follows that language teaching has a somewhat diminished role within this paradigm as far as language production is concerned. The aim of language teaching is to instill a sense of appreciation for the language and to recognise language as it functions and gives meaning to the ‘individual’ voice of the author. Language teaching is not geared around developing a language proficiency or communicative ability. Everyday language is of no academic interest. Only literary language and the voice of the author are worthy of study and so literature classes are generally taught in English and the discourse of literary criticism will take place in English rather than through the target language. Language learning and teaching achieve intellectual worth, as mentioned before, only through the study of grammar and translation, supplemented by précis and essay writing.

Tensions Between the Old and the New |I

The traditional methodology has been heavily criticised and is seen as being thoroughly outdated, precisely because of its lack of placing language in relation to its immediate context or related to wider social and cultural forces which may influence language utterances. Students will have knowledge about the language, but will not be able to speak it. Cook (1989: 127, 128) points to the fact that the traditional approach to language learning does not take account of how meaning is created through a unified stretch of text. In short, grammar-translation approaches do not stand up to scrutiny within applied linguistic theories as the sole method of teaching language proficiency. Whilst this approach may be used at university language teaching at some of the traditional institutions, it will indeed not be used in language courses which teach at ab-initio level. Ab initio courses, and indeed increasingly language courses at all levels, generally are influenced by the instrumental paradigm.

The Instrumental Paradigm Aims and Practice

At the other end of the spectrum to the traditional liberal language degrees are language courses which are informed by instrumental values. As with language provision in general, there is a rich variety in the practices in business and pragmatically oriented language classrooms, so any attempt to describe these is by nature doomed to be a gross generalization. Yet, there are certain characteristics which can be recognised as being fairly representative of language classes influenced by instrumental considerations. Because the aim of language classes of this kind is to provide students with the ‘real-world’ skills which are valuable to employers, language classes are aimed at developing a communicative competence. This would include an emphasis on speaking and interpersonal skills over writing because employers do not necessarily expect graduates to have written competence in the foreign language: “...they want people who can have everyday conversations and state of the art conversations - in other words they know the French for computer or keyboard” (quoted in Scott et. al., 1992: 18). These instrumental approaches, which at the time of starting this study may have been haphazard, have become systematically part of language teaching at universities, since the Common European Framework (CEF, 2001) has been published.