Anglophone Literature in Second-Language Teacher Education

Curriculum Innovation through Intercultural Communication

Justin Quinn, Gabriela Kleckova, Justin Quinn, Gabriela Kleckova

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367256524
• eBook ISBN: 9781000363067
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Anglophone Literature in Second Language Teacher Education proposes new ways that literature, and more generally culture, can be used to educate future teachers of English as a second language.

Arguing that the way literature is used in language teacher education can be transformed, the book foregrounds transnational approaches and shows how these can be applied in literature and cultural instruction to encourage intercultural awareness in future language educators. It draws on theoretical discussions from literary and cultural studies as well as applied linguistics and is an example how these cross-discipline conversations can take place, and thus help make Second-language teacher education (SLTE) programs more responsive to the challenges faced by future English-language teachers. Written in the idiom of literary scholarship, the book uses ideas of intercultural studies that have gained widespread support at research level, yet have not affected literature–cultural curricula in SLTE.

As the first interdisciplinary study to suggest how SLTE programs can respond with curricula, this book will be of great interest for academics, scholars and post graduate students in the fields of applied linguistics, L2 and foreign language education, teacher education and post-graduate TESOL. It has universal appeal, addressing teaching faculty in any third-level institution that prepares language teachers and includes literary studies in their curriculum, as well as administrators in such organizations.

1 Introduction

Justin Quinn and Gabriela Kleckova

This book proposes new ways that literature, and more generally culture, can be used to educate future teachers of English as a second language. Many second-language teacher education program curricula incorporate cultural studies, particularly literature, as part of preservice second-language teacher education, and yet often there is little or no theoretical or empirical validation for the way in which this is taught (although there are historical reasons).¹ Because social prestige continues to accrue to literature, the subject still occupies a large amount of curricular space, but in a manner that emphasizes nation-based survey knowledge, with scant reference to what will be relevant to language teachers.² We agree that literature is a valuable component in such curricula, but we also think that the way it is used there should be fundamentally transformed.

In this book we thus offer a new model for using literature as part of preservice second-language teacher education, one that draws on ideas of intercultural communication that have gained widespread support at university level but have not affected literature/cultural curricula. Our approach foregrounds transactions across cultures and languages, utilizing in the process not only the instructors’ untapped expertise in negotiating cultural differences but also students’ knowledge of their own culture, now in a transactional and transnational context. Thus, teacher learners study models of agency that will enable them not only to negotiate encounters with other cultures but to apply this language and culture pedagogy to their own work with language learners.

The book’s theoretical standpoint, while cognizant of developments from areas such as sociology and applied linguistics, shows how intercultural and transnational approaches can be applied in literature/cultural instruction. Thus, the book is mostly in the idiom of literary scholarship, so that advances in intercultural theory can be made available to the literary scholars who, for the most part, teach literature and culture in second-language teacher education.

That is to say, we wish to show how intercultural communication is relevant to the way literary/cultural studies are taught to preservice English-language teachers. We wish to show how literary knowledge and skills can be restructured by intercultural theory, which will then influence the knowledge and skills of preservice teachers. Several books over the past few decades have dealt with the issue, but essentially they have been written by applied linguists addressed to applied linguists, and often they were more concerned with language teaching than teacher preparation—an important distinction. These authors do not draw upon the most recent developments in literary studies. Moreover, they often explain things that literary/cultural specialists do not need explained, which can be illustrated by some chapter titles from Gillian Lazar’s book Literature and Language Teaching: A Guide for Teachers and Trainers (1993): “What Is Literature?,” “What Is Distinctive about the Language of Literature?,” “Distinctive Features of a Short Story,” and so on. Most instructors of anglophone literature in English as a second-language teacher preparation program are literary/cultural scholars. They know what literature is, they know what is distinct about it, and they know how short stories work. What these people don’t know is how their knowledge of literary canons (understood now as dynamic transnational and translingual entities) can be related to their work educating future English-language teachers. However, since the 2000s, literary theory has developed in directions that make communication across this divide feasible and profitable to an unprecedented degree.

Culture in communication

Cultures have always communicated with each other, for reasons of trade, common projects, or simple curiosity; war, too, is a type of intercultural communication. Sometimes this communication has been effective, enabling cooperation, say, against a common enemy or in an exchange of goods and services that benefits both sides. At other times, less so.

Trade has perhaps always been the primary reason to engage with another people, another language, and another culture. So when two sit down to negotiate, they first need a common language. If neighboring countries are involved, then most likely there will be people on both sides who speak the other’s language; if they are geographically farther apart, then a lingua franca will be required. However, a common language does not clarify everything. One will not be able to concentrate on the transaction if some aspect of the other’s behavior is puzzling or insulting. This can run the spectrum from how they deal with, say, belches and farts to their cosmogony and rituals of worship. Both sides must also allow space for linguistic misconstruction, developing habits of adjustment, corroboration, and correction, well beyond those required for intralingual communication. One must be aware, also, of the preconceptions which the other may have about people of one’s own ethnicity, religion, or tribe; and likewise, one must learn to distinguish such larger patterns of expectation and prejudice from the individual sitting across the table. And this must all be done before the price of grain, silver, or furs is even mentioned.

Given the extent and complexity of present global trade and migration, such skills are obviously useful. In fact, they are necessary for global engagements of any kind. Jane Jackson remarks that “the demand for individuals who can communicate effectively and appropriately with people who have had different cultural/linguistic background becomes ever more pressing.”³ It is thus necessary that language learners develop skills of intercultural speakers who can successfully communicate in intercultural interactions.⁴ Discussing the impact of globalization on teaching foreign languages, Claire Kramsch remarks that “there has never been a greater tension between what is taught in the classroom and what the students will need in the real world once they have left the classroom.”⁵ Will language learners be taught skills and knowledge that will make them successful users of the language in real-world encounters? Are their language educators equipped with the relevant and necessary knowledge and understanding?

Second-language teacher education

Previously, it was believed that the best way to prepare language teachers to be at ease in this manner was to give them as much knowledge as possible about the target culture. This included, but was not limited to, its literature, etiquette, geography, history, and religions. In German education theory this body of knowledge was called realia, a word that then subsequently spread to other European countries (though not so much to the United Kingdom).⁶ Teachers would learn to read, write, speak, and listen, and these skills would be supplemented by realia; they would then transfer all this to the students in their classes. Institutionally, such a method of educating second-language teachers was supplemented by area-studies experts: thus, a professor who knew a lot about, say, Chinese literature, would give teacher learners an overview of their specialization.

High culture was generally used by nationalism from the late 18th century as the expression of a particular nation’s spirit. Canons, including those in language-teacher education programs, were rearranged according to the requirements of this ideology—for instance, omitting or demoting works that were not in the national language or were not complementary to the national story, and emphasizing works that aggrandized the nation. Thus, when one wished to learn, say, German, one was expected to be at least generally familiar with the landmarks of German culture. Literature was obviously valorized above the other arts, as it is made of language and thus helpfully connects with the task of language learning. Having learned how to read, write, speak, and listen in German, one then additionally possessed a knowledge of the German soul as expressed in its literary works, and this knowledge would help in meeting and talking with Germans, for they must have part of that soul in them (the idea went), since they were, well, Germans.

Kramsch elaborates on this situation in German departments in the US: there the language is considered either “a functional tool for communication” to facilitate economic activity or the carrier of high culture that “tends to emphasize literary analysis or the cultivation of an intellectual canon […] from Goethe to Grass and Hegel to Habermas—a tradition unsullied by economic interests associated with linguistic competence.”⁷ In Europe we find the same division, even if it does not lead to the kind of institutional hierarchy that Kramsch describes in the US, with graduate students teaching practical foreign-language classes and faculty members teaching culture (“the teaching of language at the bottom and the teaching of culture at the top”⁸). On one side there is not enough culture, and on the other there is too much, with little or no connection between the two.⁹

There never was much empirical basis to this approach, but at least if one had read the same works as Germans had in school, then one had a common theme of conversation. What resulted decades later was the predicament that many literary scholars throughout the world found themselves in. If you were an expert in English literature teaching at a university in Japan, then most likely your job was to lecture future English-language teachers. You were unlikely to know exactly how a knowledge of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens would help your students in their future careers, but to the best of your abilities you explained these writers’ wit, their social insights, and the relations of their work with the longer tradition. Perhaps you encouraged a critical approach; perhaps you tried to share your enthusiasm for these works.

While the many curricular hours spent on literature in second-language teacher education may have some general informative value, they also may be irrelevant to the demands of the profession. Culture, in this formulation, is viewed as something superfluous to the main job of grammar drills and vocabulary lists. In Spain, for instance, future English-language teachers must pass an examen de oposición in which they demonstrate a knowledge of the historical development of British and American literature even if they will be teaching learners basic English. Such an approach is employed widely throughout Europe and beyond, even though anecdotal evidence and reviews of curricula indicate that few teachers will ever directly employ such knowledge in their classrooms. Literary scholars who teach these courses often see no reason to question the value of their work, since it receives implicit approval from educational authorities by its inclusion in curricula. Yet the realities of the profession require, as Karen Risager believes, that “the language teacher of today has to take account the shifting landscapes of language and cultures and try to enact an alternative to the national paradigm, which is increasingly untenable in the modern complex world.”¹⁰

Intercultural theory, in contrast, proposes a different model from this widely established practice of literature and culture. Rather than encouraging student teachers (as well as language learners) to absorb a large body of information about the literary tradition of the foreign language (we’ll return to problems with this approach later), students must shift their perspective, moving from that of the home culture that they grew up in to that of the culture of their interlocutor. Integral to this is the ability to view their own culture, as it were, from the outside, as something bounded, not as a universal system of behavior and social and political conviction. In the previous dispensation, language teachers (and then their learners) were supposed to be taught how to imitate the native speakers of the target culture; an intercultural approach, in contrast, encourages students to occupy what Kramsch has called the “third space” between the two cultures: that is, neither a chameleonlike adoption of the target culture nor a stubborn adherence to the home culture, but rather a stance, an attitude that enables communication between the two.¹¹

What might this look like in practice? We often encounter people who are expert users of a language but who do not pass as native speakers. They have developed a style of talking that does not fully erase their mother tongue, but does not raise barriers to understanding. (The same phenomenon can occur intralingually when, say, a person from a rural background attends university in a large city.) They are not natives, but, as evidenced by their sophisticated grasp of the target language and culture, they are not outsiders either. They might be said to occupy Kramsch’s third space.

A person like this will have acquired certain skills along the way, and these broadly resemble those already described that enable intercultural communication. Over the decades spent learning a second language, many ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Teaching English as an international language: Implications for literature courses in teacher preparation programs
• 3 The shifting faces of English-language teaching
• 4 Interculturalism and literary representation
• 5 Moving between worlds: Pedagogies of spatial and cultural mobility in children’s literature
• 6 Literature through Culture × Person × Situation
• 7 Literature, political conflict and intercultural understanding: Teaching the Northern Irish Troubles
• 8 Cultural intelligence and literature
• 9 Languages at play: Teaching intercultural awareness with J. M. Coetzee
• 10 Immigrant literature and its use in second-language teacher education
• 11 Ishiguro and politeness theory
• 12 World Englishes, English as a lingua franca, and literature
• 13 Innovation in second-language teacher education
• 14 A new intercultural curriculum for literature and culture in English-language teacher preparation
• 15 Conclusion
• Index