Testo letterario e ipertesto - National University of Ireland, Galway

della letteratura torna quindi ad essere centrale nell’educazione, anche in quella
linguistica e (inter)culturale:
In the Vygotskian perspective, ‘human social and mental activity is organised
through culturally constructed artefacts’ (Lantolf, 2000: 1). This is an important
idea because it potentially returns literature to a central role as texts through
which language learners can explore who they are and who they are not, and
who they might be becoming as they participate 25 in this new language.
Language learning is seen as the development of new ideas and personality,
rather than acquisition of a set of new labels for familiar object or at most of
new syntactic rules. Thinking and languaging are effectively inseparable in
practice […]’ (ivi: 77).
L’importanza dell’interazione con le situazioni presentate nei testi e il
coinvolgimento della personalità del discente vengono sottolineati anche da Kramsch
principalmente in due occasioni: quando si riferisce alla potenziale dicotomia
‘conscious application of rules’ vs ‘uncosciuous acquisition of conversational patterns’
(1993: 5) e richiama la visione di Halliday sul linguaggio considerato come ‘social
semiotic’ 26 ; e ancora quando definisce la nozione di contesto come ‘relational’ (ivi: 67)
indicando quanto la persona che si trova in una determinato contesto riesca a dargli una
forma, a modellarlo a seconda dei livelli su cui si sviluppa l’interazione:
In each of its five dimensions: linguistic, situational, interactional, as well as
cultural and intertextual, it [the context] is shaped by people in dialogue with
one another in a variety of roles and statuses. Because the language is at the
intersection of the individual and the social, of text and discourse, it both
reflects and construes the social reality called ‘context’ (ibid.).
Kramsch sottolinea quanto ‘the success of any communicative activity is
heavily determined by the way the participants perceive the context of situation and
shape it accordingly through their verbal and non-verbal behaviour’ (ivi.: 49). Il
contesto, soprattutto in una prospettiva (inter)culturale, ricopre un’importanza
fondamentale nell’insegnamento di una L2, poiché rappresenta la dimensione, a forte
carattere culturale, in cui la competenza grammaticale e quella comunicativa non sono
25 Sfard in un articolo del 1998 discute dei concetti di acquisition e participation definendole metafore e
esaminandole da una prospettiva dell’apprendimento: ‘The act of acquisition is often tantamount to the
act of becoming participant, and if so one can find it difficult to consider AM [acquisition metaphor] and
PM [participation metaphor] separately, let alone as mutually exclusive (Sfard, 1998: 6).
26 ‘Rather than an either – or dichotomy, grammar and communication can be seen within a view of
language as social semiotic (Halliday 1978, 1989, 1990). The structures which speakers choose to use
and hearers choose to listen and respond to construct the very context of communication in which
learning takes place. Rather than a dichotomy, then, we have multiple options regarding the way
language is used in variable contexts of use’ (Kramsch, 1993: 5).
25