Building a plurilingual habitus in language education research and practice

Keyword

Language education reserach, intercultural mediation, plurilingual habitus

Abstract

Research in language use and intercultural communication is increasingly challenging fundamental understandings of core concepts relating to language and culture. In particular, there has been considerable critique of the notions of “language” and “culture” and the ways that they have been reified in research and practice. Recent theoretical perspectives in areas such as sociolinguistics (Blommaert, 2010; Coupland 2013), translanguaging (García & Li Wei, 2014) and intercultural understanding (Dervin & Dirba, 2006; Holliday, 2016; Dervin, 2017) have increasingly emphasised that languages and cultures are not solid, bounded and easily separated entities, but rather are hybridised, emergent and contingent. However, much practice in language education and in teacher education have continued to be based on more fixed and nation-oriented conceptualisations of language and culture that essentialize languages, cultures and speakers (Dervin & Liddicoat, 2013; Derivry- Plard, 2015, 2017, 2018) and, if anything, the gap between research and practice is widening (Risager, 2007). It is often the case that practices in language teaching and learning that claim to be based on plurilingual and pluricultural principles are broadly based on a monolingual and monocultural paradigm (Derivry-Plard, 2019). This monolingual and monocultural paradigm is seen especially in the linguistic and cultural binaries that are current in the field such as the dichotomy native-speaker–non- native-speaker in language and own-culture–other-culture in culture. These constructs assert boundaries around languages and cultures and around identities and obscure questions of power, positioning, affiliation and distancing that shape the nature of communication in and across languages and cultures. In fact, these binaries can be understood as creating and solidifying differences in education practices that would claim to have bridging such differences as their aim. Approaches to language and culture learning that focus solely on a language and a culture to be learned and do not make space of learners’ own linguistic and cultural repertoires, make them invisible in language learning, and create an environment where languages are seen as in conflict rather than in relation and in which learners’ lives and identities play a marginal role in their learning to communicate with diverse others (Liddicoat & Scarino, 2013; Kramsch, 2009; Kramsch & Zhang, 2017). In this presentation, we propose a critical review of language teaching practice and language teaching education and the ways that these shape teachers and learners’ understanding of and engagement with languages and cultures. We argue that research has adopted a broader framework than practice even though research practices are still very much nation-oriented and internationally-Anglo-oriented (Zarate & Liddicoat, 2009). It is therefore necessary for research in language teaching and learning to be built multilingually and to foster a plurilingual habitus in researchers (Liddicoat & Derivry, forthcoming). We outline how such considerations have informed the research perspective of a group of international researchers studying the place of intercultural mediation in the teaching and learning of languages and cultures.

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