My presentation is about how culture came through into applied linguistics field.

1. Until the 1970s: separate areas of
inquiry
• The study of language was distinct from the study of both
literature and anthropology.
1) Linguists and grammarians, following the path set by
Saussure, studied language as a closed system of signs
shared by all members of a community of ideal native
Speakers.
2) Cultural anthropologists like Lévi-Strauss studied culture
as a closed system of relational structures shared by
homogeneous social groups in exotic primitive societies.
• Early attention on to the social context and to
acculturation factors in SLA was not taken seriously
among psycholinguistics.(Cartesian View)

2. Culture in applied linguistics through the study
of language as discourse
1) Applied linguistics need to take into account the social and
historical context of language in use.
2) The constraints imposed on individual language users by
the forces of tradition, and ideology.
3) Culture in applied linguistics came to mean ‘membership
in a discourse community that shares a common social
space and history, and common imaginings’ (Kramsch
1998).
4) Culture made it necessary to study linguistic and stylistic
variation, socially and historically situated discourse
communities, and struggles for cultural recognition.
• Applied linguistics emerged at a time of national ideologies
and ethnic consciousness.

3. Until the 1970s: separate areas of inquiry
• After the global spread of information technologies
and global migrations
1) Culture has lost much of its national moorings.
2) Culture lives in the communicative practices of
native and non-native speakers.
3) In the teaching of foreign languages, culture has
become the contextual foil of language practices
in everyday life.

4. Discourse Analysis
• It was hailed in the 1970s as the golden road to understanding
language in use.
• Culture was to be found not in artistic products, but in the
meaning that speakers and listeners, gave them through the
discourse of verbal exchanges.
• To understand culture, one had to understand both the
universal and the culture-specific constraints on language use
in discourse.
 For example, how social actors initiate and end
conversations, how they manage or avoid topics.

5. Conversation Analysis (CA)
• It emerged in the 1970s from the work of Harold
Garfinkel and Erving Goffman.
• Conversation analysis has experienced spectacular
growth to the point that for some it has become
synonymous with discourse analysis.
• CA has been focused on the here-and-now
sociological aspects of turns-at-talk, conversational
sequences and the organization of repairs of
conversation.

6. Cross-Cultural Pragmatics
• It studies the realization of speech acts like requests and apologies
in different cultural contexts, and of politeness strategies.
• This field studies the exchanges between interlocutors from various
cultural backgrounds, very often with unequal speaking rights.
• It has helped professionals (in the legal, ….) deal with the pitfalls of
communication across cultural and national contexts.
• It has helped EFL teachers design authentic communicative
activities in preparation for using language in real contexts of
everyday life.
• This studies have benefited from research done in cognitive
semantics, and the exploration of semantic universals. (conceptual
metaphors)

7. Intercultural Communication (IC)
• It has become since the 1980s a broad field of
research.
• It is related mostly to language education and
professional language use.
• The concept of intercultural competence was
defined in Europe by Byram and Zarate (1997)
on the basis of research in cultural studies and
cultural anthropology.

8. Intercultural Education
• It manifests itself differently in Europe and in
the USA.
In
Europe
Sprachlehr-
und
Lernforschung
Intercultural
Learning

9. Sprachlehr- und Lernforschung
• It focuses on interpreting the culturally foreign
Other.
• It is the work of German and Austrian scholars
in educational linguistics.
• It deals with the cultural identity of language
learners, cultural stereotypes and the dialectic
of Self and Other.
• It considers its goals as promoting tolerance,
and cross-cultural understanding.

10. Intercultural Learning
• The adjective ‘intercultural’ has been applied to
competences, speakers, learning, pedagogy, stances.
• It is aimed:1. to facilitate practical encounters within
the EU and,2. to improve cooperation across Europe.
• It has been the object of public controversy between
education researchers, and linguistic discourse
analysts.
• The growing heterogeneity of national cultures and the
global migrations are challenging:1. simplistic
dichotomies of Self and Other,2. relation of language
and culture in language education.

11. Intercultural Education in USA
• Intercultural competence has often been
associated with communication studies, and
cross-cultural psychology.
• It lost the strong moral and political dimension it
had in European educational circles (Byram2003).
• It was given an individualistic and instrumental
dimension.
• It focuses more on participation and
collaboration around common tasks for the
empowerment of the individual.

12. The 1990s : the growth of computer
technology
• It helped to mediate communication across
cultures.
• It has facilitated access to the visual and verbal
culture of distant others (e.g. Kramsch and
Andersen 1999).
• Tele-collaboration has encouraged verbal
exchanges across social and cultural contexts .
• The binary structure of the computer and its use
encouraged a structuralist approach to studying
language and culture based on objective
phenomena.(post structuralism)

13. Tension between interest in Culture
and Discourse
Structualist
• Is language a
representation of
culture?
• Teachers see in ‘culture’
something stable,
predictable.
Post-structualist
• Does language in
discourse actually
construct what we call
culture?
• The term ‘discourse’
implies a relational,
variable approach to
culture.

14. 2000 to now: culture as portable historicity and
subjectivity, constructed in and through discourse
• Some anthropologists are moving away from
studying culture to studying historicities and
subjectivities.
• The spectacular ascendancy of linguistic
anthropology transformed the nature of what
used to be called ‘culture’.

15. 2000 to now: culture as portable historicity and
subjectivity, constructed in and through discourse
• William Hanks (1996): Language as symbolic
practice constructs the genres, identities, and
subjectivities of our daily existence.
• Present utterances are mixed with prior
discourses and bring about both the historical
continuity and the discontinuity of culture.

16. Several developments have made a discourse approach
to culture more desirable in recent years.
• The increased importance given to symbolic
forms of power – global information networks,
mass marketing has increased the gap between
the realities on the ground and the discourses
that give meaning to these realities.
• Economic globalization has exacerbated the clash
between the discourse of a global market and the
discourse of local traditions. (Coupland, 2010)
• IC has to be seen as a complex system of
emergent multilingual meanings with non-linear
and unpredictable outcomes.

17. Several developments have made a discourse approach
to culture more desirable in recent years.
• Some have proposed ‘language ecology’ as a
metaphor for this complexity approach to the
study of language as cultural context.
• Blommaert (2005): the notion of ‘layered
simultaneity’ to capture the fact that actions
and events occur at any given time on various
temporal and spatial scales, often causing
miscommunication.

18. The networking culture on-line present a challenge to
institutional authority and to established cultures.
• They offer an a-historical world of connections
and relations.
• Virtual worlds provide imagined spaces can
reconstruct actual cultures without the
constraints imposed by history, biology.
• The construction of these virtual worlds is
heavily dependent on:1. symbolic systems and
2.the impact of symbolic form on the
emotions and beliefs of computer users.

19. In applied linguistic research

20. Problems come from the applied and interdisciplinary
nature of the field are:
1) Description vs. prescription,
2) Description vs. prediction,
3) Linguistic vs. educational concerns,
4) Structuralist vs. post-structuralist
approaches ,
5) who gets to frame real-world problems:
the practitioner or the researcher?

21. Description vs Prescription
• Applied linguistics has to do with the
expectation that the findings of researchers
will lead to immediate prescriptions for the
practice.
• The issue of description vs. prescription lies at
the core of any applied field.
• It raises questions of ethical responsibility that
emerge also in the second issue, the role of
culture in language tests.

22. Description vs. prediction
• While language tests are supposed to predict
future verbal behavior in a variety of social
contexts, very often their cultural content seems
to want to predict cultural loyalty.
• Language tests raise:
1) The thorny issue of the relation of language and
thought ,
2) How much cultural knowledge gate-keepers are
entitled to require of potential immigrants to
industrialized societies.

23. Description vs. prediction
• The problem is present in the other real-world
problem which applied linguists are called
upon to settle, e.g. achievement tests in
educational systems.
Shohamy (2001):how language tests have
been used to discriminate against ethnic
groups in immigration situations.

24. Linguistic vs Educationa Concerns
• Why should we teach understanding and
tolerance of other cultures when CLT already
entails expressing, and negotiating meanings
that might be very different from one culture
to the other?
• The debate was a confrontation between
discourse analysts and educationists in
Germany around the notion of culture: culture
as discourse vs. culture as moral universe.

25. Structuralist vs. Post-structuralist
approaches
• Applied linguists are confronted with political
problems in the real world where the language-
culture nexus comes into play.
• There is currently some debate as to whether to
consider this nexus from a structuralist or a post-
structuralist perspective.
• Post-structuralist like Cameron (2000):Culture as
constructed in and through discourse and
emerging locally from verbal interactions in
historically contingent contexts.

26. Structuralist vs. Post-structuralist
approaches
• Post-structuralism prevents any
essentialization of cultures.
• Rather than focus on the multiple, changing
nature of structures in the social world, it
focuses instead on the conditions of possibility
of certain structures rather than others
emerging at certain points in time.

27. Who gets to frame real-world problems:
the practitioner or the researcher?
• A case in point is the current rift between second
language acquisition research and research on
developmental bilingualism in applied linguistics.
• In English-dominated countries, learning a FL is
seen as: 1.an elite activity reserved for the
few,2.Fighting for one’s rights as a bilingual.
• Foreign languages are framed in terms of foreign
policy, while bilingual education and heritage
languages are framed in terms of civil rights.

28. In applied linguistic practice
• Language teachers are typically worried that they are
not qualified to teach ‘culture’.
• Language teachers don’t all agree that they should
teach ‘meaning’ beyond the linguistic system.
1) Fearing of teaching stereotypes ,
2) Being anxious not to politicize the language
classroom,
3) The democratization and popularization of culture,
4) Culture fragmentation into various sub- cultures make
teachers feel inadequate to the task of knowing.

29. • In our days of multiple choice tests, teachers fear
not being able to control the transmission of
cultural knowledge, if it cannot be standardized.
• The link that applied linguistics establishes
between discourse and culture invites language
teachers to reflect on how their own discourse and
culture have shaped their identity as individuals
and as teachers.
• The notion of culture has become politicized in the
economic sphere by narrow-cast marketing
strategies.
• Applied linguists are concerned about the linguistic
and cultural ‘hidden persuaders’.

30. • The role of technology in the creation of a
cyber-culture :shaping both language and
culture and transforming social life.
1) It has generated feelings of empowerment,
2) It has generated feelings of liberation from
cultural conventions and constraints,
3) It has opened up dreams of connectivity of
an a-cultural, a-historical kind.
4) It has ushered in feelings of uncertainty and
uncontrollability.

31. Future Trajectory and New Debates
• The link between any given language and
any given culture has become
controversial.
• It is evoked by various interest groups for
economic or political gain.
• Computer technology promises to do
away with cultural boundaries altogether.

32. New Debates in Research
• Culture might slowly lose its power to explain
human behavior in a multicultural world.
• In the multimedia environments of the
computer, language itself may change its value
and use.
• More important than a person ‘s language and
culture is the historical, ideological subject
positions People take.
• The debate between structuralist and post-
structuralist views on language and culture is
sure to continue in the future.

33. New Debates in Research
• Post-structuralism is a challenge for applied
linguistics because it seems to blur the
distinction between:
1) the social sciences, with their positivistic,
objective, evidence-based methods of
inquiry,
2) the human sciences with their hermeneutic,
subjective interpretation-based modes of
analysis.

34. New Debates in Practice
• Which culture to teach in a multilingual world
of global communication technologies?
• In the USA, there is right now a push to de-
institutionalize the teaching of foreign
languages and cultures.
• There is clash between proponents of bilingual
and minority education, and of foreign
language education.

35. New Debates in Practice
• Other languages are seen as exotic variations
on the common neo-liberal culture of the
English-dominant world(multilingualism lite).
• In the future, the attention of applied linguists
will shift from stable, national cultures to
portable historicities and subjectivities that
people carry in their minds as so many
potential strategies for action.

36. Culture
Discourse
AL