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 the slides used for the SIETAR presentation, click here. To see the handout used for 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: activities, more activities, justification of the methodogy, a criticism of the methodogy (and rebuttal).
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.
* Psychological rules governing perception ("Ratification rules"): - The perception (attribution) of intentionality ratifies signals as offerings. - The perception (attribution) of coherency ratifies values as stances. - The perception (attribution) of a Weltanschauung ratifies contributions as frames.
** Rules of interpretation (hermeneutic rules for laying claim to sense): - A (projected) likeness of feelings constitutes offerings as values -- Affect. - A (projected) conceptual scheme constitutes stances as contributions -- Cognition. - A (projected) "will to be" constitutes frames as scenes -- Volition. Scenes are stages in the progressive enactment of an intent, i.e. a particular instance of a historical will realizing itself. The term "scene" is thus a process-bound concept.

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.

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