21 Jan 98 Ernie Franklin - Instructional Technology Forum ...

1 Feb 98.b
Heather MacLean
Ooh, just found a delightful quote from P. Bourdieu [1]: "the all-purpose dictionary word has no social
existence."
And perhaps that is what we need to do, as teachers: Teach students (and ourselves!) how to de-socialize
words so that we can agree on their meaning. This of course raises an entirely different host of questions
such as:
● Is the word then useful? How and where? Are we creating a different world of socialization (the
academic world), which requires its own social references and coding, and is the word that we desocialized
therefore truly "objective?" (potential for infinite regression there, of course) etc.....
[1] (Ce que parler veut dire: L'economie des echanges linguistiques. Paris: Fayard, 1982:20; cited by Kramsch in:
The cultural discourse of foreign language textbooks. In A. Singerman (Ed.). Toward a new integration of
language and culture. Northeast Conference on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, 1988:75)