New Goals

Language Learners

In recent years, language learners have come to be described in terms of 'cultural mediators', 'border-crossers', 'negotiators of meaning', 'intercultural speakers' and such like. Language learning is becoming increasingly defined in cultural terms and these new names and targets for language learners imply a reconceptualisation of the language learning endeavour. In this book, drawing on the developing frameworks for cultural studies in language learning, we add a further name to the list: language learners as ethnographers.

Ethnography can be broadly described as the study of a group's social and cultural practices from an insider's perspective. It is both a method involving the detailed observation and description of particular forms of behaviour and a written (and sometimes audio-visual) account based on social and cultural theories. So, it combines both an experiential element in which ethnographers participate in the life of a community, and an intellectual element, in which theoretical concepts are used and then developed, in order to 'write culture' (Clifford & Marcus, 1986).

The attraction of ethnographic principles and practice for language learning lies in this combination of the experiential and intellectual which are so often presented as dichotomous in language programmes. As Kramsch (1993) suggests, language learning has not been helped by dichotomies such as content versus skills, teacher versus learner centredness, and indeed, language versus culture. She advocates, instead, multiple options and, along with the recent literature on cultural studies in foreign language learning, a multidisciplinary approach.

An ethnographic approach to language learning is multi-disciplinary in that it draws on social and linguistic anthropology and aspects of sociolinguistics. Conceptual frameworks are developed for observing and understanding daily life in an environment where the language in question is spoken by native (and other) speakers. This approach also implies training in methods of observation, analysis and writing which engage learners in a process of encountering 'otherness' and representing that experience not as a set of facts but as one interpretation mediated through their own cultural understandings.

The ethnographer goes out into 'the field' – a cluster of huts on a small atoll or the kitchens of a neighbouring housing estate – in order to participate in the lives of a specific group and learn about their everyday affairs and what gives meaning to them. Given that language learners will often visit a country or countries where the language they are learning is widely used, they too have a 'field' in which to participate and observe. The opportunities for some period abroad as a visitor, on a school exchange or as part of a university course are increasing (Freed, 1995). This is not only evident in Europe, with European Union student mobility schemes, but in many other parts of the world including the USA, Japan, Latin America and Australia.

The idea of using such periods abroad as an opportunity to develop cultural learning by undertaking an ethnographic project is the theme of this book. The programme developed at Thames Valley University, Ealing, in London, as part of a modern languages degree, is used as a case study to illuminate the notion of the language learner as ethnographer and to illustrate how this idea can be realised within the constraints and opportunities of an undergraduate degree course. A somewhat similar approach has also been developed at university level (Jurasek, 1996), for upper secondary school level (Byram & Morgan et al., 1994; Baumgratz-Gangl, 1990), for teacher education purposes (Kane, 1991; Zarate, 1991), for lower secondary school students (Snow & Byram, 1997; Dark et al., 1997), and for younger learners in a bilingual setting (Heller, 1994). There are also interesting connections with the general idea of the student as ethnographer in a range of educational settings, not specifically concerned with second or foreign language learning (Heath, 1983; Egan-Robertson & Bloome, 1998).

The case study is focused on advanced language learners – undergraduates who spend a compulsory year abroad as part of an applied languages degree. Both the intellectual demands of the ethnography course and the level of linguistic and communicative competence required to undertake and write an extended ethnographic study in the foreign language pre-suppose a certain level of linguistic and educational sophistication. However, the experience of the project suggests it is clearly possible to adapt aspects of the ethnographic approach to upper secondary school level and to other levels, and we hope that this book will act as a stimulus for further creative adaptations. We leave the notion of 'advanced level' deliberately vague since there is no particular stage language learners must reach before they are ready to take on the ethnographic approach. Our experience and those of others (Jurasek, 1996) is that those students with the most advanced language skills do not necessarily undertake the most interesting ethnographic projects or produce the best ethnographic assignments.

Nonetheless, although there is no self-evident relationship between level of language skill and cultural learning, the central message of this book is that language and cultural learning are not separate areas of learning: cultural learning is language learning, and vice versa. Moreover, it is no accident that the cultural component of language learning should have begun to receive some attention at a time when issues of language and culture and their relation to notions of identity are being radically re-thought. At a practical level, the evidence of the case study presented in this book suggests that introducing an ethnographic approach can contribute to enhanced language learning.

Although the approach in this book focuses on modern language students and the period of residence abroad, we live in complex and turbulent times when cultural learning is an experience for everyone. The multilingual, multicultural environments which are typical of urban sites in late modernity provide a continuing source of intercultural contact and learning.

New Times

A group of writers within the tradition of cultural studies coined the expression 'new times' in their analysis of the dispersal, fragmentation and conflict experienced in the political, economic and cultural life at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the...