Cosmopolitan Fantasies: Romanticising Language Learning - ceelbas

THE
COSMOPOLITAN
SPEAKER:
LOCATING
IMAGINED
WORLDS
Click to edit Master subtitle style
Cristina Ros i Sole
UCL
King’s College London

Summary of talk
• Context of today’s language learner.
• Moving away from binary conceptions of
cultures. Reflecting on ‘difference’.
• Beyond pragmatism. Learners’imaginaries;
Learners’ subjectivities.
• Examples of students of Croatian/Serbian
and Arabic
• Conceptualising the Cosmopolitan
Speaker

The Context of Today’s
Language Learner
• The role of the intercultural speaker and notions
of intercultural competences need to be revisited
• Learners cannot be locked into standarized and
reified fixed cultural identities (increased mobility
and networked interconnectivity play a key role).
• Learners are sophisticated intercultural
brokers…they have greater agency and
subjectivity -> learners are not naïve undiscerning
consumers of cultures.

The beginnings of ICC
Byram and Fleming (1998:8) were pioneers in
introducing the concept of ICC in language
education:
‘this intercultural speaker is able to establish a
relationship between their own and the other
cultures, to mediate and explain difference – and
ultimately to accept that difference and see the
common humanity beneath it’

Romanticising language learning
• ‘A “Romantic” disposition places the individual at
the heart of the language learning project,
accentuating the personal value of the intercultural
encounter’ (Ros i Sole and Fenoulhet 2013:1, in
press).
• Multiplying and fantasizing about difference.
• Moods and state of minds inflect
representations of cultures.
• The Intercultural conflict both
destabilises the self, and opens up new
avenues for the self.

Methodology
• Diary writing , interviews and ethnographic fieldwork.
• Insight into learners’ subjectivity, day-to-day
activities and ordinary thoughts.
• 6 participants of three different languages in
three different institutions.
• Illustrations of three participants: Weronika and
Olga (Croatian), Antonia (Arabic).
• Data was treated ‘holistically’ and informants as
people.
• Case studies present portraits of people and
‘telling cases’

Olga:
‘She walks out of her family…’
• ‘It actually started when my mum gave me a book that was
written in the 1930s/40s about this woman travelling
through…It’s called Illyrian Springs, sort of along the
coastline. So I had this kind of romantic notion. And then
also Yugoslavia, this socialist history (…) It’s this woman,
it’s fiction. I think it was written in the 30s or 40s. (…) She is
kind of this upper class woman who gets really fed up with
her husband so she just walks out of her family and she is
going to Greece and she sets off by train and she travels all
the way through but she gets to Illyria and Dalmatia. And
she never gets any further. And she meets with these
amazing characters. She has this fantastic love affair and
all this sort of stuff. So I just had this incredible romantic
view (…)

Mary:
‘(She) went off and bought some
camels..’
• Mary- (…) I’ve got a book. No, it was a TV show about Lady
Hester Stanhope. It was a comedy, but it was loosely based
on her life. Her husband died, so she had no money. So she
decided to leave the country and they went off to the Middle
East. She was buried (…) near Damascus, where is that?
Palmira! She is buried in Palmira. And she was a very
famous British (…) 200 years ago. She just took her maid
and went off and bought some camels and went exploring.
I’m really interested in women who have done this. And I
have a lot of literature and travel writing about people’s
adventures in the Middle East and I find it…I want to go and
do that. That sound like fun. I know it would be a very
different experience even, to a few years ago’

Weronika:
‘Balancing on Cultural Lines’
Cristina- How do you identify yourself in all these countries?
Weronika- Oh, that’s a difficult question, since I usually try to deconstruct
such concepts such as Eastern Europe, Central Europe, Western Europe.
I think it’s best to see yourself as fluctuating. Certain aspects of me are
very westernised since I have been living here for such a long time, in
Western Europe, so I think that certain aspects such as individualism are
completely western, whereas others, well the post-socialist experience and
what it means to live in a socialist country, to be able to understand how
people feel there and what do they expect from life. To understand the
attachment to religion and family is very Central European and I think I
can understand that because of my heritage. So I always feel myself as
balancing on this line and maybe playing a little bit with those
images and taking whatever I see as suitable for myself from
either.
• Weronika’s interview, 11/03/2009, lines 148-163

Antonia:
‘Wedged between the West and the East’
• Antonia- Well, I find it rather strange , even though I haven’t
been exposed to that culture but the fact that I read more
about it…I need to learn Arabic, of course. I find that
actually there are some common things between my
background and that background. It’s difficult to give you
concrete examples, but I did find that…You know. I only
have been to Turkey and Jordan as Eastern countries, Middle
Eastern countries, and I think there are things that we share,
even the way that we think as a nation. It is probably more
influenced by that culture than by Western European
culture. Because this country, Romania, is wedged between
the west and the east and we have had all these influences
and I do recognise some bits and pieces, although it’s very
early, you can’t actually know until you are there, you are
steeped in that culture.

Weronika’s Banal Cosmopolitanism
Having come back from London, I received the regular order
of my fruit and veg box. And I found, amongst other things,
the January King cabbage –at least I think that is how it is
called. And I found myself planning to make Sarma – a
Balkan speciality, which is making by wrapping meat and
rice filling in cooked cabbage leaves. This dish is found in
almost all central European countries existing as gotjabki in
Poland and Kohlrouladen in Germany. But as I was looking
up the recipes for Sarma on the internet I remembered its
texture and taste as I ate it in Bosnian restaurants in
Sarajevo. It was perfect.
Weronika’s Diary, page 18

Cosmopolitan Competences
• Breaking down of territorial boundaries
• Extension of moral responsibility and solidarity to
communities beyond the local or the national.
• Multiple loyalties within transnational ways of life
(Beck 2006)
• Rejection of national-state as the cultural (and
socio-political) unit and replacing it with
transnational approaches and their
interdependence.

The Cosmopolitan Speaker
1. ‘Difference’ is personalised and localised.
2. Gradual building of cultural credentials
through learners’ experiences and trajectory.
3. Testing and reconstructing the boundaries of
the self
4. The cultural and the intimate
5. Testing the self in processes of becoming
(there is no barrier between the ‘self’ and what
is ‘possible’ in another culture).

Conclusion
• The Intercultural Speaker assumes a static national
binary paradigm that limits the positions language
learners can adopt: as tourist, business/women
(insiders or outsiders) and the stances they can take.
• We need more flexible paradigms that allow for
language learners to be more dynamic and embrace
‘spaghetti junction’ identities (Cooke 2013) that position
them at different stages.
• Learners do not only aspire to ‘mediate’ between two
stable and static cultures but they inhabit, grow and
transform themselves and their cultures.

6/4/12
Thanks!