18. Bourdieu: Social Field Theory
Habitus:
“a socially inculcated
disposition to perceive,
judge, speak, or act…”
(Collins & Blot, 2003:73)
19. Bourdieu: Social Field Theory
Habitus:
On entering a new field, the habitus will need to change or adapt
20. Bourdieu: Social Field Theory
Habitus
Field
‘Acculturation’
(Berry, 1997)
Language &
Communication
21. Language teaching institutions are in a
position to enable migrant students’
habitus to re-tune themselves to the new
social fields that they find themselves in,
thus better enabling them to acquire
capital. This process is enabled and
catalysed by students pursuing integrative
strategies, and by living in host-culture
environments which themselves support
integration.
When Mr Orange, from orange-land, goes to blue-land, then at least at first he’s going to interpret the behaviour and Saussurian signifiers of the host community through an orange lens. A lot of the time this isn’t a problem – a punch in the face means that same thing pretty much everywhere, regardless of which culture you have, but a lot of the time this has the potential to cause confusion, misinterpretation and misunderstanding.
So what? Well, first of all I think we need to know how our students are doing in terms of intrepreting their sociocultural surroundings here. What do they make of it all? How can we encourage, assist and catalyse successful acculturation? This is no small thing, with no easy quick-fix answers.