Читать книгу Culture in Language Learning - Группа авторов - Страница 17

In American domestic affairs, there is a notable rise of interest in heritage languages for social and cultural purposes: Native American ancestral languages, master-apprentice programs (Hinton 1994), interest in Western Armenian, Yiddish, Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean as heritage languages linked to vanished or distant cultures (Peyton et al 2001). This interest is in part an ecological concern for the preservation of endangered languages, in part a romantic need to reconnect with one’s roots in the face of the impersonal forces of the market and of information technologies, in part a desire to exercise long-distance proselytism in one’s country of origin (e.g., Cuba, Armenia, Vietnam). Yet, the issue of which culture to teach (Cuban culture or Cuban-American culture? North Vietnamese or South Vietnamese or Vietnamese-American culture?) when teaching Spanish or Vietnamese in the U.S. has not yet been addressed in the case of heritage languages, probably because it is a politically sensitive issue.

By contrast, teaching the national culture of the host country is part and parcel of the socialization of immigrants learning the language of the land as their second language. Until recently the pedagogy of English as a second language was unabashedly acculturationist, indeed, assimilationist. It taught immigrants mainstream middle-class American or British ways of speaking, thinking and behaving in everyday life. In view of the increasingly multicultural nature of industrialized societies and following post-modernist conceptions of culture, new research is being drawn upon to conceive of culture in the teaching of second languages to immigrants. Language memoirs and personal testimonies of bilingual/multilingual individuals offer rich insights into the transcultural identities and subjectivities of language learners (e.g., Pavlenko & Lantolf 2000). The notion of ‘third place’, first introduced by Kramsch 1993, captures the need to think of culture as a subjective, portable, entity, linked to an individual’s history and his/her variable subject position in variable contexts of language use. As a way of giving meaning to one’s life, it is not a place to belong to but a way of belonging.