From Practice to Theory and Back Again

Claire Kramsch Department of German, University of California, Berkeley CA 94720, USA

A research project may begin in a 'telling moment' in the language classroom. This article describes the phases of a research project as the author moves from classroom to library, from empirical data to theoretical framework and back again. The methodology includes a comparative dimension through the collection of data from learners in three countries and demonstrates the development of insights from these three sources to gain deeper understanding of learners in the classroom from which the research questions originated. The research process thus becomes the beginning of new processes and plans for the classroom.

In the Classroom

This Wednesday morning, in my 11 o'clock third semester German class, I am discussing with my 15 undergraduate students the short story by Yüksel Pazarkaya Deutsche Kastanien that they have read the night before. The story is about a 6-year-old boy, Ender, born and raised in Germany of Turkish parents. Ender is snubbed one day in the schoolyard by his best friend Stefan, who doesn't want to play with him anymore because, he says, Ender 'is not German but an Ausländer [a foreigner].' Ender runs back home and asks his mother 'Who am I? Turkish or German?' The mother doesn't dare tell him the truth. The father answers: 'You are Turkish my son, but you were born in Germany' and tries to comfort him with the promise that he will talk to Stefan.

As a warm-up exercise, I have brainstormed students' responses to the questions: 'Why do people leave their country, what problems do they encounter in a foreign country?' The students are quick to offer all kinds of reasons and problems, for the situation is familiar to many of them. They have no difficulty expressing themselves in German: 'People look for opportunities, for a job, but they have no money, no friends, no family, they don't know the language, they can't find a job, there are many prejudices, cultural differences?'. To prepare the class for the topic of the story, I then engage them in the following exchange in German:

CK: What do you associate with the word Ausländer [foreigner]?

Ss: (silence)

S1: different?

CK: yes, people who are different, foreign (I write both words anders, fremd on the board). In America, who is an Ausländer?

Ss: (long silence)

S1: (hesitantly) In Germany Ausländer are all the people who don't look like Germans.

(long silence)

S2: Here in America ... people can look different, many have an accent, bad English ...

S3: Or no English!

S4: (half to himself) Are there any Ausländer here in America?

The students' silence and S4's question puzzle me. Why are the students suddenly so reluctant to speak? And why does S4 seem to believe that there are no foreigners in the United States? I switch topic and turn to the story proper. The class becomes lively again. I make myself a note to remember this incident and to further explore the matter.

The telling moment

Most of my research is triggered by such 'telling moments' in the classroom – my misunderstanding of a student's utterance, an unusual silence, a student's unexpected reaction, a grammatical or lexical mistake that doesn't make sense to me. Or sometimes it is just that the class that I prepared so well totally bombed and I don't know why. On the way back home, I replay the scene in my head, examining all its facets. I tell about it to my colleagues and friends: Has that ever happened to them? What do they think? What went wrong? I talk to some students I trust: what is their take on the event? Slowly I piece together a range of possible interpretations. Some tell me that Americans, unlike the Germans, don't care about who is a foreigner or a native, provided one lives in the country. People that are here illegally are a matter for the police, not for private citizens. Some tell me that it is not politically correct to talk about foreigners, or even to identify anyone as a 'foreigner', that it is almost a slur, which is why foreign students in the US are called 'international' students. Others tell me that American students probably don't understand why the boy in the story is not a German citizen, if he was born and raised in Germany. They probably think that Ender is a first-generation German, not a Turk. Yet others suggest that my questions were too vague, so the students didn't know how to answer.

Building up to a research project

So if the term Ausländer has different connotations for a German and an American, then perhaps the American students resonate quite differently to the story than I do. I decide to find out how they understand the story by having them write in class, in their own words, a 4–5 sentence summary of what the story is about. I collect the 15 summaries and, that night, I compare them to one another. To my amazement, not only are the summaries all very different, but the students' point of view comes across sometimes very visibly in the way the students have constructed their summaries. Take, for example, the following:

1. Diese Geschichte ist uber einer jugend. Er heißt Ender. Und er hat eine Probleme weil, sein Freund ihm sagte daß er kein Deutscher ist. Und alles wo Ender geht, die Menschen sagt zu ihm daß er kein Deutscher ist. Er ist ein Ausländer von Türkei.

(This story is about a youth. He is called Ender. And he has a problem because his friend told him that he is not a German. And wherever Ender goes, people say to him that he is not a German. He is a foreigner from Turkey.)

In this summary, notwithstanding the occasional case and gender errors, the combined effect of the lack of conjunctions between the sentences, the repetition of 'daß er kein Deutscher ist', and the lapidary last sentence, renders well the sense of sadness this student intends to convey. But the direct borrowing, into German, of the American phrase 'he has a problem' (er hat eine Probleme) inserts into this summary the voice of a society where problems are seen to lie with the individual rather than with society.

In the next summary, the evaluative voice of the student comes out clearly in the last sentence (italics are mine):

2. Es gibt ein Türke Kind, das Ender heißt, das in Deutschland wohnt. Er ist im Deutschland geboren, und er spricht Deutschambesten. Er geht zu eine Deutsche Schule, und seine Freunden sind Deutsche. Aber, die Deutsche Kinder sind ihm böse und sie sagen das Ender keine Deutsche ist, weil seine Eltern Türke sind. Das wird schwerer, wenn er älter wird.

(There is a Turkish child, who is called Ender, who lives in Germany. He was born in Germany, and he speaks German best. He goes to a German school, and his friends are German. But the German children are nasty to him and they say that Ender is not a German, because his parents are Turkish. It will be more difficult when he is older.)

This last sentence voices the point of a view of an author who knows something about discrimination and has no illusions about its eradication. We hear such indignant authorial voices also in the following three passages where again I put the student's evaluation in italics:

3. Seiner Vater kann die Fragen nicht gut antworten. Die Geschichte fragt die Frage, daß wenn ein 'Ausländer' in Deutschland geboren ist, er ist Beider ein Deutscher und ein Türker. Wie kann dieser Mann was etwas zu tun wissen? Er ist in die Mitte von zwei unfreundliche Seiten.

(His father cannot answer the questions well. The story asks the question that if a 'foreigner' is born in Germany, he is both a German and a Turk. How can this man know what to do? He is in the middle of two unfriendly sides.)

4. Er wünschte zu wissen – wer bin ich? Dieses Problem kommt oft wenn man ein Ausländer ist. Es ist die Frage 'Was ist der Unterschied zwischen uns? Aber es gibt keinenUnterschied in realität, außerdem daß der superficiel ist.Die Kastanien sind ein Symbol. Es bedeutet das wir unsere Unterschiede machen.

(He wants to know - who am I? This problem often often comes when one is a foreigner. It is a question 'What is the difference between us? But there is no difference in reality apart from that it is superficial. The chestnuts are a symbol. It means that we make our differences.)

5. Die Jungen sagte, 'Sie sind Deutsche Kastanien! Du bist kein Deutscher!' Aber, die Kastanien und Ender sind beide jetzt Deutch!

(The boys say 'They are German chestnuts! You are not a German!' But the chestnuts and Ender are both German!)

I can see that these summaries are not merely a miniversion of the same original story, but narrative constructions in their own right. Some are longer than others, some read like a police report, others like a personal commentary, yet others like a precis. Some include an evaluation or a moral, others extract the philosophical truth of the story as in the following simple summary:

6. Es ist über was ist und nicht ist deutsch. Deutsch Vorurteil sagt, daß man nicht anders sein kann. Also, wer ist Ender? Wie kann man deutsch werden?

(It is about what is and is not German. German prejudice says, that one cannot be different. So, who is Ender? How can one become German?)

while others remain close to the facts. Through these summaries, I start hearing the voices of the individual students: puzzled, empathetic, outraged, academically savvy. I can see how much of themselves and of their view of the world they have projected into these summaries. Also, I discover that there are different ways of writing summaries: some are general impersonal statements about the theme of the story (as in summary 6), others tell the facts in their original sequence but in shorter form, others contain extensive evaluations of the events in the story (as in summary 4). The students have been taught differently how to write summaries, depending on which school they went to.

I am, of course, particularly curious to find out how these summaries express the plight of Ausländer in Germany. I discover that the students either avoided the topic 'foreigner' altogether and described the story as a story of discrimination against a child from 'an ethnic minority', or they tried to coin words impossible in German like 'first generation German' or 'Turco-German' that reflect their American understanding of the situation. I am starting to see that the silence I experienced in class was more than a linguistic problem; it was a cultural problem.

Reviewing the Research Literature

Where should I turn to for a better understanding of what's going on? I start making myself a list of what I have found and that I need to read up on:

• First, I need to inform myself about the recent immigration laws in Germany. Why is Ender not German? When can a child born in Germany of foreign parents become a citizen? What are the facts?

• The German word Ausländer evidently evokes mental representations that are different from those evoked in American English by the word foreigner. For an American, a schoolboy like Ender evokes: ethnic minority, Anglo-Americans vs. recent immigrants. For a German, the story evokes: xenophobia, Germans vs. foreigners. Each of these terms evokes a different frame, script, or schema of expectation. I need to read up on connotations, associations, frames and schema theory (Cook, 1994; Goffman, 1974; Tannen, 1979).

• Language doesn't only represent or refer to social reality (here, the original text the students had in common), it constructs social reality, e.g. the very term Ausländer evidently constructed the difficulty we had in discussing foreigners in the US. I need to read up on the relationship of language and social structure (Halliday, 1978), discursive roles (Goffman, 1981), social constructionism (Shotter, 1993) and to re-visit the literature about the relationship of language, thought and culture also called linguistic relativity (Gumperz & Levinson, 1996).

• Writers construct not only reality, but a discoursal self through their discursive choices. I need to read up on the discursive features of narratives (Fowler, 1986; Short, 1996) and on the relation of discourse and identity in writing (Ivanic, 1998).

• Even in such short summaries, there is often a distinct evaluative component that expresses an authorial point of view. I need to read up on evaluation in narrative (Hunston & Thompson, 2000; Hymes, 1996; Labov, 1972).

• Finally, texts are not written free of generic constraints. The genre that I imposed on the students, the summary, seems to have its own conventions and expectations that constrained what students could and could not write. I need to read up on genre as social practice (Swales, 1990).

Thus, as I explore the various facets of the incident, I start looking to how applied linguistics research and theory might help me phrase some of my original puzzled queries into research questions. As I delve into the theory, other aspects of the practice emerge which I had not noticed or for which I had no name. For example, as I read up on writing and identity, Ivanic's term 'discoursal self' comes in handy for my purposes. What the students were constructing through their written summaries was, of course, not a permanent social identity, but a kind of textual identity (Kramsch & Lam, 1999) or discoursal self (Ivanic, 1998) that expresses how they position themselves vis-à-vis the story, i.e. their subject-position. In the same manner as the author of the story makes his authorial or discoursal self clear through his rhetorical style and the way he tells the story, so do my students' discoursal selves become apparent in the way they exercise authorial control and point of view through their choice of what they say, what they don't say, in their 4–5 sentences.

What they don't say ... in order to say other things. As I write this sentence in my notebook, I am reminded of an article I had read by A.L. Becker on the six dimensions of difference in the way people 'language experience' (Becker, 1985). He makes the point that one has to give up saying many things in order to say other things, and that each one of us places the silences differently. He calls this the 'silential' dimension of difference. Other dimensions he mentions are: the referential (we refer to a reality within or outside of language), the structural (we shape the grammar), the generic (we shape the genre), the medial (we shape the medium), the interpersonal (we shape a relation with our listener/reader). How did each of my students shape reality in that way? What did each of them not mention, that was mentioned by others? Perhaps I could find in this insight away of organising class activities so that students can compare their summaries for what each says or doesn't say, and for how they structure their discourse. I jot down inmynotebook: 'Have all the students write their summaries on the blackboard for subsequent general discussion of their dimensions of difference?'

As I read I find new ways of phrasing my observations in the terms used by researchers. I now understand Germans' views of Ausländer not just as a different way of naming immigrants, but as a whole different 'mental structure of expectation' (Tannen, 1979) or 'conceptual schema' (Cook, 1994) that includes different scripts of behaviour, e.g. the distinction between Inland and Ausland, the notion of not belonging, or not being a citizen, the connotation of temporary status associated with being an outsider or Ausländer. Americans, I hypothesise, don't have this category, because they expect anyone who lives in this country to 'belong' here, to be an insider, irrespective of whether they are actually citizens or (legal or illegal) aliens. In fact, the word 'alien', a legal term that would correspond to Ausländer, seems to be hardly used in everyday parlance to refer to someone living in the US. But wait ... Is this really so? Am I not espousing a White middle-class Anglo-American bias? Most American students do understand discrimination based on race and ethnicity, especially if they belong to an ethnic minority group, even though this discrimination is not necessarily phrased in terms of national identity and of Deutsche vs. Ausländer as in Germany. As I read through the literature, trying to make sense of my 'telling moment', I write down my thoughts in my notebook. Writing things down, sometimes in English, sometimes in German, helps me link the thoughts to the language in which they are most easily expressed and to the different worldviews they represent.