Date and place: Dec 6th-8th
Johannes Kepler Universität, Linz, Austria
Organisers: IALIC
(International
Association for Languages and Intercultural Communication) see below or www.ialic.org
for details
Theme: The
Transcultured Self: Experiencing Languages and Intercultural Communication
About 50 participants all of whom
were required to give a 20 min paper with 10 min discussion time in 5
simultaneous strands:
- The Transcultured Self in the
Language Classroom
- Business and Management in
Intercultural Contexts
- Texts, Performance and Creative
Practice
- Transculturing the Self: Theory
and Practice
- Interlanguage and Linguistics
An outline of the conference aims
can be found here
Sponsors: included Multilingual
Matters www.multilingual-matters.com
publishers of many intercultural journals and books
Cost: return rail fares - BC /
conference fees: IALIC sponsors - 50% / myself - 50%
General points
- Wide variety of participants
nationally - most working in countries other than their own
- Interdisciplinarity as a norm
- Very wide variety of
interpretations of intercultural - business/ literary/
philosophical
- Focus on FL students in HE and
their ethical growth (assumed later to be passed on into schools)
- Focus on students spending time
in another country (e.g. the EU Erasmus programme or the ‘year
abroad’ of FL students from some countries)
- Absence of focus on schools - I
was perhaps the only one who spoke directly on the classroom
- Debate over the role and value
of the transcultured self and intercultural approaches
Some thoughts and issues:
- Are they not the aim of all
education not just FL teaching?
- Why must the transcultured
self and intercultural approaches be seen as positive?
Globalisation is a very successful transculturing process?
- Is the concept of the transcultured
self simply a ‘green light’ giving ethical justification to
globalising business?
- Should FLT focus not on transculturing
the self but on protecting the untranscultured self, and enable
it to be projected through the alien medium of a foreign language?
- Why, if English is becoming the
universal FL, should cultures of English-speaking countries be the only
ones almost all school children are exposed to? How to encourage the
strong positive values of cultures whose languages are never taught?
- It seems rooted in the need of
western countries to escape their cultures e.g. through those of Asian
religions - whereas for most of the world the direction is the opposite
- Presumes the self needs transculturing
and is therefore somehow wrong or incomplete? What of the role of family,
church and so on?
- Can these/ should these be
evaluated or even formally assessed?
- Is such a concept as an
‘extended’ or ‘enlarged’ culture preferable?
CELT benefits
- Paper given on project in half
hour session - approx 10 present (out of approx 50 at conference) + other
discussions (no obvious partner)
- Extended abstract published in
conference booklet
- Possible publication of Exploring
Methodologies project on IALIC newsletter
- Updating on range of
intercultural approaches and concerns
Suggestions
- we take IALIC membership as it
provides a journal, a network and is connected to a wide variety of
institutions
- we take the EU and its funding
seriously
- we are fully aware of the
implications of EIL
- we are aware of the FLT context
The seminar will introduce some of
the intercultural approaches taken in teacher training in Poland and proposed for the
classroom, within the context of communicative approaches to FLT and English as
an International Language. An approach emphasising the exchange of cultures
central to the use of a foreign language, and therefore with productive skills,
the expression of the home society and the individual, as important as the
receptive skills of comprehending another society.
Such an approach centres on the
awareness and skills of the culture/language issues involved in such an
exchange rather than on knowledge of other societies. In a world where the use
of English by those leaving school is most likely to be with another foreign
language user (and probably a visitor to their own country) this is seen as the
more important. Intercultural awareness and skills are therefore those which
enable such an exchange to take place most effectively. This makes language the
primary outcome of an intercultural approach with ‘culture’ as its method -
which seems appropriate for the FL classroom.
To introduce the discussion the work
of the BC Poland Culture in ELT
project and the work undertaken in the teacher training college in £ódŸ will be
presented, along with the principles that underlie them. The Culture in ELT project
includes the BS webpages, a summer school where practising teachers create
classroom materials for the pages, and a ‘joint venture’ with FL methodologists
for writing training modules for the cultural element of teacher training
courses. From the college in £ódŸ examples will be given of investigatory
intercultural mini-projects (with an emphasis on cultural source analysis) and
student planned lesson sequences of intercultural activities for different age
groups and language levels.
The overall purpose being to engage
with those involved with theory and research on what can be done in the FL
classroom and the session is hoped to include a significant element of
discussion based on the materials brought. On one side there is an intention is
to advertise the work currently being done in Poland - but more importantly is the
opportunity to receive constructive comment from those at other levels on the
directions that might be taken in the future.
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The Transcultured Self: Experiencing Languages
and Intercultural Communication
The Context
The themes addressed at IALIC
conferences in recent years have been full of fascinating ambiguities. With
Languages and Intercultural Communication as their central concern,
conferences have focused on borders and boundaries, poetics and praxis, the
global and the local, and latterly with the cultural twists and turns of
translation. This year’s theme of The Transcultured Self: Experiencing
Languages and Intercultural Communication is no exception. Part of our
experience of the field of Languages and Intercultural Communication (LAIC)
is the variety of concepts which struggle to articulate a set of common
concerns: intercultural, multi-cultural, cross-cultural, transcultural and
meta-cultural all come and go with the fads and fashions of academic and
popular discourse.
At previous conferences
'ethnographic self fashioning', 'narrating the self' and the notion of the
‘intercultural speaker’ have also figured in debate, alongside a concern for
the experiential and ethnographic dimensions of living abroad, learning other
languages and dwelling in travel.
The Focus
On this basis the aim of the 2002
IALIC conference is to engage in debates that sharpen thinking by focusing
attention on the Self. The notion of the 'transcultured self' is clearly
suggestive of transformation, and of an ideal, in the everyday worlds and
lived experiences of languages and contingent communication. Reconsidering
concepts, reviewing practices and developing strategies are of little
practical use unless they reflect the reality of Languages and Intercultural
Communication. For example, learning other languages usually assumes the
acquisition of a new way of seeing (and not just saying) things. However,
students on year-abroad programs or relocated employees of multinational
concerns often return to their home countries more imbued with (negative)
stereotypes of the host country's culture than before their departure.
The Questions
Consequently, the theme of our
conference prompts a range of applied and theoretical questions around
interwoven, core themes:
- Educational and Linguistic
- What kinds
of reflections, reactions and resistances do languages and intercultural
education provoke in learners and teachers?
- What are the
discourses of transcultural language use and social practice?
- Conceptual and Ideological
- What are the
tensions between functional and critical claims made on language
learning and intercultural communication in developing intercultural
speakers and transcultured selves?
- Is the transcultured
self a utopian ideal and how well are we served by interculural
speakers?
- Autobiographical and Literary
- Can we
construct a valid body of theory from personal and literary testimonies
and how might this affect curricula, adapted to different institutional
needs?
- What are the stories of
change and trial that come with intercultural speech?
Invitation for Papers
IALIC is a specialist forum for
academics, practitioners, researchers and students. Working within an
interdisciplinary and critical framework, members share a special concern for
the theoretical and practical interplay of living languages and intercultural
understanding.
Proposals for paper presentations,
panel discussions and workshops on the conference themes are invited. Whilst
the main disciplinary focus will be Languages and Intercultural
Communication, we welcome contributions from related disciplines: modern
languages, linguistics, communication studies, and from the fields of business
studies, literature, anthropology, psychology, education, and cultural and
area studies. The official conference languages will be English and German,
although some papers may be delivered in other languages of preference. We
would, however, prefer if you could present your paper in English, in the
interests of reaching the widest possible audience.
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What is IALIC?
The International Association for Languages and
Intercultural Communication was voted into existence by delegates at the 4th
Cross-Cultural Capability Conference, Leeds Metropolitan University December 1999.
The Association's constitution sets out its aims as follows:
1. The Association will provide support to scholars in their academic
life within the field of Languages and Intercultural Communication, and will
promote Languages and Intercultural Communication as an academic field.
2. The Association will seek to bring together international scholars
and practitioners from a broad range of disciplinary backgrounds, among which,
anthropology, sociolinguistics, psychology, literary studies, management and
organisation studies, as well as linguists and applied linguists. In so doing,
it will seek to:
2.1 create the conditions for a new body of
intellectual enquiry which intersects consciously and reflectively with other
disciplines;
2.2 represent the living reality of experiences of
increased mobility and intercultural communication, as well as addressing the
professional concerns brought about by the relocation of the research and the
teaching of living languages;
2.3 promote in theory and practice greater
intercultural understanding and, thereby, address the causes and the
consequences of cultural barriers and racial intolerance.,
Dr Crispin Thurlow
IALIC Communications Officer
Centre for Language &
Communication Research
Cardiff University, PO Box 94, Cardiff, CF10 3XB, Wales
Tel (direct): (029) 2087 6324 / Fax
(CLCR): (029) 2087 4242