All slides and bibliographies appear on the web at:  sietar.boylan.it  (no “www”).
It is therefore unnecessary to take any notes during the presentation.
.

To see the presentation, click on the numbers from 2 to 20 above.
 
Given the requirements of our tertiary, global economies,
knowing how to communicate in any language
means knowing how to:
 
- manage on-going co-constructed meaning-making in situ,
whether with native speakers or lingua franca users,
 
- relate culturally (existentially) to interlocutors in English,
not just explain concepts to them,
 
- share values through English seen as a behavioural matrix
(Which values? Theirs/ours/those of mutually created third spaces)

To see the presentation, click on the numbers from 3 to 20 above.
 
Given the requirements of our tertiary, global economies,
knowing how to communicate in any language
means knowing how to:
 
- manage on-going co-constructed meaning-making in situ,
whether with native speakers or lingua franca users,
 
- relate culturally (existentially) to interlocutors in English,
not just explain concepts to them,
 
- share values through English seen as a behavioural matrix
(Which values? Theirs/ours/those of mutually created third spaces)

To see the presentation, click on the numbers from 4 to 20 above.
 
Given the requirements of our tertiary, global economies,
knowing how to communicate in any language
means knowing how to:
 
- manage on-going co-constructed meaning-making in situ,
whether with native speakers or lingua franca users,
 
- relate culturally (existentially) to interlocutors in English,
not just explain concepts to them,
 
- share values through English seen as a behavioural matrix
(Which values? Theirs/ours/those of mutually created third spaces)

To see the presentation, click on the numbers from 5 to 20 above.
 
Given the requirements of our tertiary, global economies,
knowing how to communicate in any language
means knowing how to:
 
- manage on-going co-constructed meaning-making in situ,
whether with native speakers or lingua franca users,
 
- relate culturally (existentially) to interlocutors in English,
not just explain concepts to them,
 
- share values through English seen as a behavioural matrix
(Which values? Theirs/ours/those of mutually created third spaces)

This new "need-to-know" requires specialists in
communication but also in languages as culture.
 
 
A new definition of language: As the expression of a culture,

a language is a shared, historically-rooted will to mean
 
expressing a shared, historically-rooted will to be (or “culture”).
 
 

Who can prepare such specialists?
 
University language centres?
But they teach English as “decoding texts”.   Unless...
 
University degree courses in languages?
But they teach English as textual realizations.   Unless...
 
Company training courses in Intercultural Communication?
But they tend to ignore language;
they teach communication as behavioural recipes.   Unless...

Teaching languages as culture
(or teaching Intercultural Communication linguistically)
for example, by making learners ethnographers

 
Boylan, P. (1980)  L'apporto dell'antropologia linguistica all'insegnamento delle lingue straniere.  In: SLI, Lingua e Antropologia, Bulzoni, Roma, 1983, pp. 497-509.

Boylan, P. (1998)  Being one of the group. VI IPrA Conference (Reims) Manuscript available: www.boylan.it under “Research”

Roberts, C. (2000)  Language learners as ethnographers. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.

Byram, M. (2001)  Developing Intercultural Competence in Practice, Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 2001

Variations in subject's response (formality/informality, distance/intimacy)
correlated with variations in language (Br.Eng. / “Indian English”)
 
Eva did not an attempt to use the phonology and lexico-syntax of Indian English (the variety we hear Gandhi use in documentaries). Instead, Eva internalized Gandhi's mind-set and expressive stance, then spoke spontaneously.  Since language is a certain "will to mean" deriving from a certain "will to be", this sufficed to create a rapport with her interlocutor.
See www.boylan.it for bibliographies, syllabi, tasks for each course taught.

Type of ethnographic questioning conducted
by University of Rome III students (Course in English for Intercultural Communication):

not quantitative, positivist questioning* which
  - “constructs and constrains the answers” (Roberts, 2001)
  - makes the “strange” familiar...

 but qualitative, hermeneutic questioning** which
  - requires a transformation of consciousness to grasp what is “strange”
  - makes the “strange” genuinely “strange.”

*Oppenheim, A. (1992), Questionnaire design, interviewing, and attitude measurement,
  London: Continuum.
 
** Spradley, J. (1979), Ethnographic Interview, New York: Holt Rinehart & Winston
    Agar, M. (1996), Language Shock: Understanding Culture, New York: Morrow.

What are the theoretical underpinnings for this
 

- method of inquiry into the various cultures

 
- which is also a way of describing expressive habits
  

- and is also a method of teaching each variety of language as a mode of “relating”, of “sharing values”, of co-constructing meanings in situ and in real time?

Making the familiar strange (and making that strangeness genuinely so):
the Chicago school of Urban ethnography during the Depression years

Why the term “urban ethnography”?  Because normally ethnographers study tribes in the jungle.  The Chicago sociologists saw that tribes exist in the city as well (for example, the criminal underworld, tramps and gypsies, religious cults), each with its own language, that could be studied with ethnographic methods.

   "Sociologists at the University of Chicago turned out a series of studies based on investigations into their own city which have been generally recognized as the beginning of modern urban studies, and as the most important body of social research on any single city in the contemporary world." (Hannerz, 1980)
 
slum inhabitants - Zorbaugh, H. W. (1929). The Gold Coast and the Slum,
                               Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
taxi-hall dancers - Cressey, Paul (1932). The Taxi Hall Dance.
                               Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
juvenile gangs - Shaw, C. & H. McKay. (1942). Juvenile Delinquency and
                           Urban Areas. Chicago: Univ. Press.

Purpose: to unmask...

   ...how societies create the “odd” and the “normal”
   ...how societies base presumptive knowledge on stereotyping and implicit
      cultural categories (and thus do not understand the Others in themselves).

But these are the same mechanisms encountered in language courses!
They are the mechanisms of projection and stereotyping that keep language learners from really understanding the semantic values of the L2 words they are studying, or how they themselves harbour – somewhere within themselves – the Otherness of the culture they are studying.

See Coleman (1998) on returning ERASMUS students who saw only what they went to see and whose categories of “odd” and “normal” remained unchanged by their foreign sojourn.  Clearly, these students did not know how to use their L2 to grasp and share new values “from the natives' point of view” (Malinowski, 1961 [1922]), i.e. ethnographically.  So can it really be claimed that they “understood” their L2 interlocutors abroad?  Can it really be claimed that they “understand” their L2 at all, even if they get good marks in listening comprehension tests?

End of the Depression (1939) = end of urban ethnography
 
In studying marginal social figures, sociologists turned to

• functionalism, 

• neo-positivism
   
  (i.e., from “understanding them” to “understanding how to manage them”)
   
  Brief resurgence of “Critical ethnography” (post '68)
   
  "Chicago Irregulars": Faris, 1970; Carey, 1975; Lofland, 1980...

plus Schutz's students* at the New School for Social Research
*We can include H. Garfinkel (Studies in Ethnomethodology, 1967), a student of T. Parsons and inventor of the “students as boarders in their own home” technique to unmask social structures in home life.  He developed ethnomethodology through correspondence with Schutz.

Teaching languages as culture using urban ethnography
i.e., by interviewing members of the L2 “tribes” one may find in one's home town
 
(Example: in Rome the British community may be found in the churches, schools, etc. it has there.)
 
 Warning   The same shift is occurring in this field as happened in Chicago:

• from understanding one's foreign interlocutors from their point of view

• to learning to manage one's social and economic exchanges with them.

The shift covers the three major paradigms of urban ethnography:  (1.) “Making the strange familiar” – i.e., projecting your schemes on it, which is the dominant paradigm today;  (2.) “Making the familiar strange” – learning to see your own culture as problematic, e.g. Garfinkel's “student boarder” experiments; (3.) “Making the strange genuinely strange” – learning to see life “from the natives' point of view”, e.g. the Chicago school 1929-39.

You can trace the various currents in Byram, Kramsch, Zarate.

Case in point:

Picture
(Promoting Intercultural Communication Through Using Real Experiences)
 
E.U. Project – 18 universities and language centres in 12 countries –
launched February, 2005, at the Language Centre of the University of Amsterdam, under the direction of Cor Koster.

Purpose: introduce the ethnographic approach to language learning into EU university courses and language labs through a 20 hour module based on CD ROM material, model questionnaires and a Teacher's Guide. The module teaches L2 students to interview, in their home towns, L2 speakers on visit or who live there, and define their cultural stance.

Unresolved question: which urban ethnography approach to use?

Example:  the PICTURE CD module used by French employees
at SIEMENS (Sophia/Nice) who are studying English (or German)
 
Should the subjects they interview ethnographically be:

- French? (so that the employees, before internalizing the Anglo mind set, first learn to “distance” themselves from their own culture)
 
- English or German visitors to Nice? (to grasp the mind-set of an English or German speaking interlocutor through interaction and through ethnographic questioning)
 
But who counts as an “English” or “German” speaking interlocutor”?
- Swedes who speak perfect Standard BrEng? LFE (Lingua franca English) ÖsDe SchuleDe ?
- Pakistanis speaking perfect Pakistani Eng? Berliner Turks speaking perfect TürkischeDe?
- British or German expatriates who, over time, may mutate culturally?

(The PICTURE project is developing a series of guidelines.)

Current debate on the scope of the ethnographic study.
Should it:

- document interviewees' use of language (e.g., their English or German)
  as revealing their cultural assumptions (an ethnolinguistic study)?

- document cultural values directly and if so how?
   - cultural dimension questions?
   - critical incident questions?
      Whose? The incidents French people have in in the U.K. or in Germany?)
      The incidents that British or German vistors have in France (Nice)?

- document what to say or why to say it in X's culture?

- document how to act or what values to have in X's culture?

- document responses to a universal questionnaire on opinions and attitudes (like The European Values Study www.europeanvalues.nl)?

Answers depend on theoretical framework:
What does it mean to “communicate”?
What does it mean to “communicate interculturally”?
How do we know that we understand a communicative intent?
What is language and what is culture?
Whose English/German should be used in exchanges conducted in English/German?
Should I, a French employee at Siemens (Nice), use “my” English?  The Queen's English?
A Lingua Franca English (koiné) Hoch Deutsch? Bayerische Deutsch?  
Or should I try to use your English or German, defined as the will to mean
you share with your community, based on your shared will to be?
What questioning (or silence) best promotes understanding?
 
Answers also depend on practical issues:
How ready are EU teachers to accept a novelty like this?
Might it be more strategic to start with positivist style questioning, then, if accepted, issue a second CD teaching hermeneutic questioning?

Thank you for participating.

Bibliography
(prepared by Cor Koster of the PICTURE project)

For the bibliography of texts given to students to read in courses, see the individual courses under TEACHING at www.boylan.it