SIETAR Congress 2004, Berlin - Thursday, April 1st, 2004 - Track 9 (DOR 24, 311)
New
Wants, New Ways, New Words*
Patrick
Boylan <patrick@boylan.it>
Department
of Linguistics -- University of Rome III -- via
Ostiense 236 -- 00146 Rome, Italy
To see the
abstract
of the SIETAR presentation, click here. |
To see examples of courses currently implementing the ideas described in the SIETAR presentation, click here. |
Click on the
underlined words below to see papers
explaining: |
To visit Patrick Boylan's university homepage, click here. |
HANDOUT
IF:
language is communicative behavior, thus an accumulation of
volitional acts, deriving from a volitional matrix,
culturally-determined to a large extent,
THEN: to be more
effective, language instruction and intercultural training should
change their learning paradigms: less cognitive, more affective and,
above all, more volitional.
Functionally,
therefore, LANGUAGE should be seen:
1.
not just as a way of representing (thus,
less linguistics, fewer explanations)
2. not just as a way of doing (thus, less pragmatics, fewer game type exercises)
3.
but above all as a way of being* (thus,
more ethnolinguistics and ethnography)
*
See Halliday's personal function, where Cross-Cultural Competence is
rooted.
Phenomenon |
Perception* |
Interpretation** |
1. An accumulation of signals... |
...taken to be intentional and thus an offering... |
...constitutes an existential value. |
2. An accumulation of values... |
...taken to be coherent and thus a stance... |
...constitutes a conversational contribution. |
3. An accumulation of contributions... |
...taken to reveal a Weltanschauung and thus a frame... |
...constitutes a scene, the basic unit of a narrative event. |
|
||
|
Bibliography
at www.boylan.it -- click on the
word RESEARCH
Slides
at http://interculture.interfree.it/sietar/
in a few days.
*TITLE:
New WANTS -- To speak another language (or, more simply, communicate interculturally) most effectively, one must acquire a new volitional (existential) stance. Put more simply, one must begin to want things one might not normally want in one's native culture.
New WAYS -- The new wants will produce new behavior: one will begin doing things differently to seek different kinds of satisfaction. This includes meaning-making activities: the way one participates in a meeting or writes an email.
New WORDS -- Language is not words but a behavioral complex; nonetheless, behavior includes talking and gesturing: thus among the new ways of behaving will be the use of new words to make one's wants felt. It is at this point -- after the acquisition of new wants and new ways -- that language instruction and intercultural training should work on verbal production, not at the beginning of a course or training session. Postponement means that students/trainees see verbal meaning as a product of a particular existential stance: communication therefore becomes not the learning of a given code but the search for a common code with one's interlocutors.