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As Street’s (1993) memorable phrase ‘culture is a verb’ suggests, cultures are ‘doing things’: vibrant, pulsating and alive. Such a statement heralded a turning point in our view of cultural identi...

Until recently, the role of material culture in language has been little studied or seen as the context where language use is situated (Aronin et al., 2018). This article looks at the materiality o...

This paper will build on Bhabha’s (1992, 1994) conceptualization of Third Space and the ‘unhomely’ by turning to the power of the tangible, material and ordinary aspects of the intercultural encounter. In order to do this it focuses on the ‘crisis points’ that languagers encounter in their biographies and puts forward a frame of analysis based on the concepts of ‘Chronotope’ and ‘Mudes’ that places languagers’ spatio-temporal coordinates in synchronicity with their life itineraries. I will conclude that such interpretation of languagers’ third spaces help us seeing their identities as processes of becoming that challenge homogeneous, static and abstract versions of the intercultural encounter.

Language learners' increased mobility and the ubiquity of virtual intercultural encounters has challenged traditional ideas of ‘cultures’. Moreover, representations of cultures as consumable life-choices has meant that learners are no longer locked into standard and static cultural identities. Language learners are better defined as cosmopolitan individuals with subjective and complex socio-political and historical identities. Such models push the boundaries of current concepts in language pedagogy to new understandings of who the language learner is and a refashioning of the cultural maps they inhabit. This article presents a model for cultural understanding that draws on the theoretical framework of Beck's Cosmopolitan Vision and its related concepts of ‘Banal Cosmopolitanism’ and ‘Cosmopolitan Empathy’. Narrative accounts are used to illustrate the experience of a group of students of Arabic and Serbian/Croatian and their use of the cultural resources at their disposal to construct their own subjective...

This paper reviews research on learner and tutor interaction in asynchronous computer-mediated (ACM) conferences used in distance learning. The authors note claims made for the potential of ACM conferences to promote higher order critical inquiry and the social construction of knowledge and argue that there is a general lack of evidence regarding the actual achievement of these aims in such conferences. We present and discuss the relevant research literature currently available on the effects of social presence, the tutor’s teaching and moderating strategies, and task type. The paper concludes with recommendations for future research in each of these areas.

In this article we contrast two distance foreign language programs developed at two European institutions of higher education (the Modern Languages Program at the Open University, UK; and the English Program at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Spain) as instances of two pedagogical models used to address the many challenges posed by teaching languages at a distance. A detailed analysis of both approaches reveals that the pedagogical choices made by both universities are in great measure determined by the historical and cultural contexts in which both institutions are embedded. In addition, we discuss the similarities and differences between the two and draw several conclusions regarding the appropriateness of the two distance universities' general educational, administrative, and technological models for distance language learning.

This paper investigates language learners' negotiation of their social selves in the target language community of practice from a narrative perspective. In order to do this, I draw from post-structuralist and sociocultural approaches to language learning and L2 identity (e.g. Belz, 2002; Kinginger, 2004; Norton, 1997, 2000; Pavlenko, 2002, 2003) which assume that learners do not communicate in a social vacuum but acquire new roles, positions and vantage points from which they negotiate their L2 selves. More specifically, I argue the need for investigating language learners' negotiations of legitimacy and agency in the L2 (Kramsch, 2003; Lantolf & Pavlenko, 2000) within a narrative perspective. As language learning and use occur socially, language learners need to be studied as negotiators in the relations of power that are established when entering into contact with the L2. Acquiring ‘audibility’ (Miller, 2004), the ‘right to speech’ (Bourdieu, 1977) and acquiring new positions in the L2 (Davies & Harre, ...

In distance learning provision in languages, fault correction and feedback can facilitate teacher-student dialogue. This article examines teachers' beliefs and assumptions about faults and the attitudes of both teachers and learners towards the correction process, all of which can play a key role in fostering this dialogue. Our findings are based on two surveys, one of 215 students enrolled on an intermediate Open University Spanish course and one of a sample of 18 tutors who teach on this course. The results of the two questionnaires suggest that the strategies currently in use for identifying and correcting faults may not be explicit enough. We conclude that this problem may be addressed if both tutors and students are given the tools to make the process more transparent and are encouraged to see dialogue as an essential component in the feedback mechanism.

This paper uses narrative accounts to explore intercultural experiences and the perception of the self by second language (L2) users. The analysis follows poststructuralist and postmodern theories of cultural and language identity. Extracts from the autobiographies of three chicano writers from the 1980s to the new millennium, Richard Rodriguez's Hunger of Memory, Ilan Stavans' On Borrowed Words and Gloria Anzaldua's Borderlands: La Frontera, will be used to illustrate the socialisation processes that take place when acquiring a second or third language and the creation of bilingual identities. The narrative analysis of the testimonial accounts will on the one hand be based on Bourdieu's theory of language (1991), which highlights the unequal relationships of power between different speakers, and on the other, on the premise that identities are multiple and subject to change over time.

This paper analyses how cultural understanding of the target culture can be addressed at beginners' level. To do this, I will discuss how some theoretical and pedagogical principles from Intercultural Learning, Cultural Studies and Second Language Acquisition throw light on the teaching of culture at the outset of foreign language learning. While it is widely recognised that culture and language occur in tandem, there is a dearth of examples of how reflection about the target culture can be introduced in the adult beginners' language learning context. In this paper I will argue that the notion of culture as a negotiable entity can be introduced at the outset of language learning. The role of cultural identity and subjectivity in texts are the two key concepts on which this argument will be built. I will then describe how these ideas can be transferred to three different aspects of language teaching methodology: the need to portray heterogeneous national cultures and other markers of cultural identity, obj...