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THE THEORETICAL BASES FOR EXPERIENTIAL L2 LEARNING PRACTICES BASED ON THE NARRATIVE RECONSTRUCTON OF THE SELF WITHIN A NEW ETHOS AND WORLDVIEW.

.Psychological feasibility

'Retelling' empowers patients to see and live their lives differently. -- John McLeod, Narrative and Psychotherapy. London: Sage, 1998. [Head, School of Social and Health Sciences, University of Abertay Dundee]

Risk of Dissociative Identity Disorder?
Potential for multiple personalities; healthy if integrated and willed (trauma-based, automatically triggered) -- F.W. Putnam, Diagnosis and Treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder, 1989.

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Philosophical feasibility (sense)

Ricoeur's theorization of moi/soi ('I' versus 'Other, including Me-objectified') (Crawshaw, 2002 )

Pedagogical feasibility

a. Constructionist view of language acquisition. (Delia et al. 1982)

b. Convergence of narratology and IC theory

Let us examine this last point more closely...

Narrative ≠ recounting, 'acting out' events

_______________↓

__________chronicle (police report: events,
__________attribution of motives/causes
__________attribution of a sense)

Narrative = 'recounting' or 'acting out' of events in a way that confers an overall existential sense, a “moral, evaluative standpoint” -- McLeod et al. (in press)

Difference:

Medical, judicial, technical narrations:
attribution of motives/causes + attribution of a sense

Literary, conversational narrations:
attribution of motives/causes[?] + attribution of a sense*

*by convention (Once upon a time...) and simulation based on establishing a climate and a climax (or anti-climax). Like-pitched events seem to lead to a cathartic, meaningful denouement... or to one that denies any meaning (which is still a sense!).

Critical Intercultural Communicative Competence (CICC) is the ability to do this in real-life intercultural interaction: confer shared sense on events.

L2 speakers with CICC confer existential senses on the events they recount, that are 'in line' with their L1 interlocutor's worldview. They react to her/his recounting of events, within the felt existential framework that shaped them.

At the same time they are aware of the relativity of their and their interlocutors' worldviews (and thus accounts of events), and have unmasked the hidden agendas and (false) ideologies.
One meaning of CICC is, therefore, knowing how to tell a story well within a culture, knowing it's just a story (or a myth).

The L2 learning activities previously listed --

• Biography of an L2 double 

• Communicative translations

• Literary pastiches

• Becoming an L2 double,

• Ethnographic participant observation

• Stanislavskian dramatization,

-- are based on rewriting oneself within a new cultural framework. Students learn to become good L2 story tellers (not simply commentators of other people's tales).

Thus, in a neo-Saussurian perspective...
the intercultural study of English (or any language)
becomes the study of
the sedimentation of instances
of wills to mean in a particular way
that produce classes of ways of being.

Discursively, the ways of being
manifest themselves through

cultural artefacts
 − body language, emblems and symbols, verbal
language, interactional style, themes, scripts...  − 

and practices,

the forms of which are historically motivated (alogical) tokens of historically determined (sedimented) wills to mean.

Identity rewriting, through

• written narratives
  Literary pastiches
  Communicative translations
  Biography of an L2 double...       and especially

• lived-out narratives
  Becoming an L2 double
  Stanislavskian dramatization
  Ethnographic participant observation...

All these activities enable learners to map experimentally the will behind the tokens of a community,
otherwise accessible only through endless
philological/hermeneutic reconstruction.

Further information,
talk with me during office hours.
For times and dates:

www.boylan.it

then click on the word "OFFICE".

Patrick Boylan

Department of Linguistics
University of Rome III