Yale Language Series

E D I T E D B Y P E T E R C . PAT R I K I S

Reading Between the Lines

PERSPECTIVES ON FOREIGN

L A N G UAG E L I T E R AC Y

Yale University Press

New Haven &
London
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Reading between the lines : perspectives on foreign language literacy /
edited by Peter C. Patrikis.
p. cm. — (Yale language series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-300-09781-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Language and languages—Study and teaching. 2. Literacy—Study and teaching.
I. Patrikis, Peter Charles. II. Series.
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
. . . et femina dux erat

To Claire Kramsch
for leading the way
 Contents

Preface ix
Introduction
Peter C. Patrikis 1
1 Reading Cultures and Education
William A. Johnson 9
2 Literacy and Cognition
Mark Turner 24
3 Literacy as a New Organizing Principle
for Foreign Language Education
Richard G. Kern 40
4 Playing Games with Literacy: The Poetic Function
in the Era of Communicative Language Teaching
Carl Blyth 60
5 Reading Between the Cultural Lines
Gilberte Furstenberg 74

vii
viii Contents

6 Reading and Technology in Less Commonly Taught

Languages and Cultures
Masako Ueda Fidler 99
7 Experiential Learning and Collaborative Reading:
Literacy in the Space of Virtual Encounters
Silke von der Emde and Je√rey Schneider 118
8 Double-Booked: Translation, Simultaneity, and Duplicity
in the Foreign Literature Classroom
Mark Webber 144
9 Ethics, Politics, and Advocacy
in the Foreign Language Classroom
Nicolas Shumway 159
List of Contributors 169
Index 173
 Preface

The essays in this volume were originally presented at two conferences

conducted by the Consortium for Language Teaching and Learning: one on
technology, foreign languages, and undergraduate education held at the Mas-
sachusetts Institute of Technology in October 1998, the other on new perspec-
tives on foreign language literacy held at Brown University in October 2000.
That these essays, all of which have been extensively revised, are gathered in
one volume is not mere serendipity: the chapters share a renewed emphasis
on reading in the teaching and learning of foreign languages.

I am grateful to the contributors for their willingness to include their

essays here and for their patience on the long road from conference to book.
And I am grateful to the readers of the earlier draft of the collection: Mary
Ann MacDonald Carolan of Fairfield University, David Goldberg of the As-
sociation of Departments of Foreign Languages, and especially James S.
Noblitt of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, whose guidance,
wit, common sense, wisdom, generosity, and friendship I treasure.
Finally, I would like to express my thanks to the Andrew W. Mellon Foun-
dation and the C. V. Starr Foundation for their generous and enlightened
support of the Consortium’s conferences.

ix
 Introduction
p e t e r c . p at r i k i s

Only in the stream of thought and life do words have meaning.

—Ludwig Wittgenstein

It is then that the reader asks that crucial question, ‘‘What’s it all about?’’ But the
what ‘‘it’’ is, is not the actual text . . . but the text the reader has constructed
under its sway.
—Jerome Bruner

Between the lines . . . The titular metaphor of this book has an admit-
tedly Zen-like or postmodern character. It suggests presence by absence,
meaning where nothing is written, a third or higher dimension hidden from
the view of those who inhabit Flatland. At the same time, it is a simple and
common metaphor that a≈rms that every text is more than the sum of its
parts, that every text means more than the linear assembly of its individual
words, their dictionary definitions, their morphology or structure, and their
syntactic relations with other words. A text does more than realize linguistic
code in context. It also refers back to other texts, what Henry Widdowson,
borrowing a term from literary theory, has called ‘‘intertextuality’’ (Wid-
dowson 1992). An invitation to a wedding, a memorandum announcing a
sta√ meeting, a letter of complaint about a defective purchase—such texts,

1
2 Peter C. Patrikis

and they are of course innumerable, embody social and cultural norms, and
those norms are actualized with reference to previous texts. Citation, allu-
sion, patterns of rhetorical organization, and genre protocols assume routine
and predictable forms. We do not speak and write with complete originality.
When we speak and write, we place ourselves in a textual tradition of expec-
tation and authorization. We play with that tradition (we should recall that
the Latin root of the word allude means ‘‘to play’’), but we do not violate it.
Such violation might be ignorance of the rules. It might be idiocy (the Greek
root of that word—idiot—suggests a private language). Or it might be lyric
poetry, when we consider the examples of Mallarmé, a Celan, or one of the
Surrealists. In other words, language learning has not only a social and cul-
tural dimension but also a historical dimension. A text must reach into the
past in order to be comprehensible, as I have discussed in an essay on culture
and language teaching (Patrikis 2000).
Every teacher of language will recognize in the metaphor of reading be-
tween the lines the primordial di≈culty of every student: to move beyond
token-for-token processing to analysis and the understanding of the multiple
meanings of a text, to progress from mere decoding to rich interpretation.
And every teacher will recognize that trivial texts are not e√ective in guiding
students to higher levels of reading.
The neglect of serious reading—by which I mean reading that does more
than hunt for facts, that is more than referential, that provokes questions,
that awakens the judgment and imagination—took hold in the heyday of the
oral proficiency movement with its reaction against the supposedly rebarba-
tive practices of the grammar translation movement and with its putatively
pragmatic approach to oral communication in reaction against the limita-
tions of the AudioLingual Method. Signs in train stations and weather re-
ports passed for significant texts, readily decipherable by the novice learner.
Poetry was largely consigned to the dustbin, as Carl Blyth notes in his chapter
with regard to a poem by Jacques Prévert. Similarly, the perplexities of cross-
cultural encounters evaporated in the bland give-and-take of question and
answer in short interviews. The widespread demise of serious reading re-
flected the baby-with-the-bathwater mentality that often appears to char-
acterize what is seen as progress in the teaching and learning of foreign
languages.
What takes place within the field of foreign languages mirrors what takes
place in the wider economic, political, and social culture, as two major
retrospective surveys have demonstrated (Kramsch and Kramsch 2000; Lan-
tolf and Sunderman 2001). For many years now, and with increasing fre-
quency, we have come across repeated announcements of the death of read-
 Introduction 3

ing (for example, Highfield 2000; Johnson 1995): television, computer games,
Web surfing, and almost any other form of entertainment have been invari-
ably invoked and condemned as lethal to the life of the mind and inimical to
the permanence of the written word. (These arguments follow in the lineage
of Plato’s criticism of poetry.) No one has argued the case more ardently and
more elegantly than the distinguished and eccentric literary critic Harold
Bloom. In an interview published in the Yale Bulletin and Calendar (2000)
following the publication of his book How to Read and Why, Bloom la-
mented, ‘‘The real enemy [of reading] now is the screen. Whether it’s the TV
screen or the motion picture screen or most likely, in the end, the computer
screen. The real enemy is the Internet.’’ A similar sentiment issues from
Esther Dyson, computer guru and member of President Clinton’s advisory
board on the National Information Infrastructure. In her book Release 2.0
Dyson frets about whether the world of multimedia is undermining the
reading of texts (Dyson 1997). If in the past we were accustomed to debating
the relation of orality and literacy, we now seem to have shifted the terms of
the argument to literacy and multimedia. In his essay William A. Johnson
traces the evolution of the distinction.
In sharp contradistinction to Bloom’s apocalyptic pronouncement about
literacy, many foreign language classes and many of the essays in this volume
testify to a renewed interest in reading, which is in fact promoted and not
diminished by the World Wide Web. Anecdotes and examples abound.
In a presentation to a group of visiting language teachers Andrée
Grandjean-Levy of Cornell University discussed an intermediate French
course that was based almost exclusively on Web sites in France. One day she
witnessed a student struggling alone at the computer through a di≈cult,
complex text about an elegant restaurant in Brittany, the kind of purple
touristic prose that in the past would have been unimaginable and deemed
impossible at the intermediate level. The student read with great concentra-
tion and at the end of the passage exclaimed aloud to himself in English,
‘‘Wow! That’s cool!’’
During a site visit to a liberal arts college in New England, a German
teacher recounted to me that his analogous Web-based experiment with an
intermediate course on Berlin had surprising results: the students did much
more work, much better work, much more independent work, much more
creative work, and declared that it was their favorite course. These anecdotes
suggest that students want to read real texts from the real world, that they are
willing to make the e√ort to do more when they are intellectually motivated,
and that the World Wide Web abolishes dogmatic distinctions among ele-
mentary, intermediate, and advanced texts. The anecdotes suggest—and
4 Peter C. Patrikis

dozens of colleagues have confirmed—that students are motivated by virtual

texts, whereas they are nonplussed by the same texts in a textbook. What is
interesting and has yet to be adequately explained, is that even remarkable
texts seem deadened by marginal notations, by established agendas (known
as ‘‘pre-reading’’ and ‘‘post-reading’’), and by often numbingly transparent
questions that serve no purpose other than ‘‘checking comprehension.’’
The renewed emphasis on reading in foreign languages has other sources
unrelated to the hyperbolic library of the World Wide Web: (1) the expansion
of the traditional foreign language classroom beyond its four closed walls to
include written communication with students, teachers, and other individ-
uals across the globe (see Furstenberg in this volume; Kern 1996; and Koike
1998); (2) the movement to promote foreign languages across the curriculum
(Krueger and Ryan 1993); and (3) an increasing dissatisfaction with narrowly
defined notions of oral proficiency (Roche and Salumets 1996).
The strongest impetus for renewing the importance of reading is perhaps
the reconsideration of the role of foreign languages in undergraduate liberal
education. As colleagues across the country rethink the place of foreign
languages in the undergraduate curriculum, they are confirming that place as
a fundamental aspect of general education and consequently reasserting the
importance of reading and interpreting a text. The humanistic rationale for
the study of foreign languages has been as persistent (see Lantolf and Sunder-
man 2001, pp. 8–11). That rationale has also been consistently wishy-washy.
Assertions of the value of foreign languages
§ the study of foreign language disciplines the mind
§ the study of foreign languages teaches about one’s native language
§ the study of foreign languages promotes understanding of ‘‘the other’’
ring hollow, not because they are incorrect—they are not!—but because they
have become platitudinous pieties and because these values seldom seem to
have any concrete realization or practical reflection in the actual foreign
language classroom. These assertions have attained the status of axioms,
when in fact they are hypotheses requiring demonstration and proof, so that
students, teachers, parents, professors of literature, administrators, accredita-
tion boards, and trustees understand the goals and activities of foreign lan-
guage study and also so that foreign language teachers remain vigilant in
justifying the values of their courses and in actualizing those values in all
aspects of their teaching. Patricia Chaput provides a radical rethinking of the
values of undergraduate foreign language study in her forthcoming book on
college language teaching.
The practical and educational values of foreign language study and of
 Introduction 5

reading a foreign language text are not di≈cult to enumerate: close analy-
sis of a text involves assembling facts, making contrasts and comparisons,
understanding conventions, confronting di√erences, problem-solving, test-
ing—indeed, challenging—assumptions, constructing hypotheses, making
informed judgments . . . in short, reading between the lines.
The subject of reading is by no means a novel one in the field of foreign
languages, and it has captured the attention of many scholars (for two exam-
ples, see Kramsch 1993; Swa√ar, Arens, and Byrnes 1991). This volume seeks
to strike out in other directions. The space between the lines of a text is
capacious and deep, so it does not come as a surprise that the contributors to
this volume enter that space in di√erent ways and with di√erent perspectives.
Each chapter is an invitation to a new perspective, and collectively the essays
suggest the richness and di√erence of many new ways of considering the acts
of reading and interpreting texts and cultures. Oddly, in the past, reading
often has been characterized as a passive skill, as if the words on the page
or screen simply had to be absorbed and processed. All the authors presented
in this volume understand and advocate an activist approach. They represent
a variety of languages—English, Czech, French, German, Greek, Japanese,
Latin, and Spanish—and an even greater variety of perspectives, including
cognitive theory, critical applied linguistics, technology as hermeneutic, his-
tory, literary theory, and cross-cultural analysis. Yet all concur in their under-
standing that reading is a cultural initiation and a cultural practice that lies at
the heart of humanistic inquiry.
William A. Johnson opens the collection by turning the tables on many
conventional notions about literacy and common theories about reading and
technology: insisting that reading is a social rather than an individual or even
isolating activity, he adumbrates the concept of a ‘‘reading culture,’’ while
exploring the technologies of that culture both in Greco-Roman antiquity and
in our computerized present. Literally examining the shape and size of the
written line, Johnson looks between the lines to locate the sociocultural dy-
namics of reading culture and of the pedagogical culture of higher education.
Traversing cognitive science and hermeneutics, Mark Turner emphasizes
the processes of conceptual blending as the fundamental di√erences between
languages and cultures and suggests that adult learners of foreign languages
should engage in specific comparisons of grammars and styles (learning how
to blend templates). Turner looks between the lines to indicate that literacy is
not displayed in surface features but resides in the ability to harmonize
(blend, in his terms) features that conflict in order to make powerful in-
ferences about the empty spaces between languages, and to forge conceptual
integrations.
6 Peter C. Patrikis

Presenting a magisterial overview of the scholarship on literacy, Richard G.

Kern redefines literacy in order to propose a new model of classroom-based
foreign language study. Building on what we might call the sociocultural turn
in language teaching, Kern emphasizes the importance of critical reflection as
a learning device and not simply as a political-educational stance. Reading is
not merely a basic skill; it is the fundamental activity for creating, interpret-
ing, and reflecting on meaning.
Attacking many of the shibboleths of current pedagogical orthodoxy, Carl
Blyth argues that many contemporary methodologies impoverish the nature
of language; he urges an approach that embraces the poetic and phatic func-
tions of language and that restores pleasure to the foreign language curricu-
lum. Blyth’s call for attending to the aesthetic nature of language is echoed in
the chapters by Furstenberg, Johnson, Kern, and Emde and Schneider, and it
reflects his concern that the contemporary communicative approach fails to
recognize the richness of language between the lines.
Analyzing massive amounts of data from on-line cross-cultural exchanges
in English and French, Gilberte Furstenberg demonstrates how close reading,
aided by modern information technology, leads to high-level investigation of
cultural assumptions and to cross-cultural understanding. Although Fur-
stenberg is aiming at developing cultural literacy, it is important to note how
much that process and goal depend on reading, rereading, and reflecting on
how others (fellow students in one class in the United States and fellow
students in France) are reading and rereading. For her, reading between the
lines is reading between the cultures.
With examples drawn from political discourse in Czech, English, and
Japanese, Masako Ueda Fidler moves between the micro-level features of
discourse analysis to macro-level features of cultural context to demonstrate
that no one-sided approach can account for the many meanings of a text.
Hers is one of the many endorsements in this volume of the notion that
computer technology provides us with the means to enable students to dis-
cover those meanings on their own.
Exploiting a computer game technology in order to enhance reading and
writing in an intermediate-level German language course, Silke von der
Emde and Je√rey Schneider merge play (the game) with work (language
learning), postmodern literary theory with second language acquisition re-
search, and self-reflection with communication to study another example of
a reading culture. Between the lines they site—and catch sight of—possibil-
ities of intellectual collaboration, critical engagement, and self-reflection.
Like Furstenberg’s, their students come to value rereading, what the authors
call circular reading.
 Introduction 7

In his examination of teaching Franz Kafka, Mark Webber o√ers many

double readings: reading in English and in German, interpretations in En-
glish and in German, educational readings of literature in translation and
political readings of literature in translation. Between the lines and between
the languages, Webber envisions translation (in its multiple senses) as yet
another path to critical thinking and self-reflection.
Finally, Nicolas Shumway concludes the volume with a profound re-
minder that every choice made in the classroom is as much political and
philosophical as it is pedagogical and heuristic, that teaching foreign lan-
guage literacy is a moral as well as an educational responsibility. At a far
remove from belletristic aestheticism, Shumway’s notion of reading between
the lines erases the bland neutrality of the foreign language syllabus and
pushes teachers and students alike to the limits of the moral imagination.
It will not require a perceptive reader to identify many other commonal-
ities among the contributions to this volume: technology at the service of
teaching and learning; the changing role and decreasing significance of the
all-purpose textbook; the shifting responsibilities of students and teachers;
deep questioning of the current conventions of the foreign language profes-
sion; the creation of reading communities and of literate cultures within the
classroom; and the restoration of foreign language study to the heart of the
humanities. Little in this collection of essays suggests that the teaching of
foreign languages is going to get any easier: new demands, new possibilities,
new information, and new insights open the spaces between the lines ever
wider.

References
Bloom Extols Pleasures of Solitary Reading. Yale Bulletin and Calendar 29(1)
(September 1, 2000) »http://www.yale.edu/opa/v29.n1/story4.html….
Bloom, H. (2000). How to Read and Why. New York: Scribner.
Bruner, J. S. (1986). Actual Minds, Possible Worlds. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Chaput, P. (forthcoming). College Language Teaching. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Dyson, E. (1997). Release 2.0: A Design for Living in the Digital Age. New York: Broadway.
Furstenberg, G. (1997). Teaching with Technology: What Is at Stake? ADFL Bulletin 28(3):
21–25.
Highfield, R. (2000). Thinkers Forecast the End for Money and the Written Word
(January 11, 2000) »http://www.smh.com.au/news/0001/11/features/features4.html….
Johnson, S. (1995). Repossession: An Academic Romance: The Rossetti Archive and the
Quest to Revive Scholarly Editing. Lingua Franca 5(4)
»http://www.linguafranca.com/9505/repossession.html….
Kern, R. (1996). Computer-Mediated Communication: Using E-Mail Exchanges to
Explore Personal Histories in Two Cultures. In Telecollaboration in Foreign Language
8 Peter C. Patrikis

Learning: Proceedings of the Hawaii Symposium, edited by M. Warschauer, pp. 105–19.

Honolulu: University of Hawaii Second Language Teaching and Curriculum Center.
Koike, Y. (1998). Who Is Teaching My Students? Paper presented at the conference
‘‘Transformations: Computers, Foreign Languages, and Undergraduate Education,’’
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, October 1998.
Kramsch, C. (1993). Context and Culture in Language Teaching. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
———, ed. (1995). Redefining the Boundaries of Foreign Language Study. AAUSC Issues in
Language Program Direction. Boston: Heinle & Heinle.
Kramsch, C., and O. Kramsch. (2000). The Avatars of Literature in Language Study.
Modern Language Journal 84(4): 553–73.
Krueger, M., and Ryan F., eds. (1993). Language and Content: Discipline- and Content-
Based Approaches to Language Study. Heath Series on Foreign Language Acquisition
Research and Instruction. Lexington, Mass.: Heath.
Lantolf, J. P., and G. Sunderman. (2001). The Struggle for a Place in the Sun:
Rationalizing Foreign Language Study in the Twentieth Century. Modern Language
Journal 85(1): 5–25.
Patrikis, P. C. (2000). Site Under Construction: The Web of Language, Culture, and
Literacy. In The Learning and Teaching of Slavic Languages and Cultures, edited by
O. Kagan and B. Rifkin, pp. 45–60. Bloomington, Ind.: Slavica.
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Interdisciplinary Prospects. Studium Deutsch als Fremdsprache—Sprachdidaktik, vol.
10. Munich: Iudicium Verlag.
Swa√ar, J., K. M. Arens, and H. Byrnes. (1991). Reading for Meaning: An Integrated
Approach to Language Learning. Englewood Cli√s, N.J.: Prentice-Hall.
Widdowson, H. (1992). The Relevant Conditions of Language Use and Learning. In
Language and Content: Discipline-Based Approaches to Language Study, edited by Merle
Krueger and Frank Ryan. Lexington, Mass.: Heath, 27–36.
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Oxford: Blackwell.
 1

Reading Cultures and Education

william a. johnson

In this essay I wish to invite reflection on reading or, more precisely, on

reading culture. As a cultural historian and a classicist, I naturally want to
ground my thoughts historically, and I propose to do so by means of contra-
puntal sketches from the reading culture of classical antiquity. Indeed the
reader will have to grant me some indulgence in rooting this set of reflections
so particularly in my own deepest scholarly interest, which is the reading
culture of the ancient Greeks. But I hope to convince you, first, that consider-
ation of the ‘‘otherness’’ of an ancient reading culture can help to sharpen
considerably our perspective on reading cultures generally—including our
contemporary technologically driven one. Second, although most will read-
ily grant a broad relation between reading and education, I hope also to
convince you that the understanding of reading culture is central to perceiv-
ing in its particulars not only how technological change may a√ect education
but also how educators, and in particular instructors in the humanities, may
be able to derive clear advantage from technological change.
But what do I intend by speaking of reading as ‘‘reading culture’’? Reading,
I will insist, is a social rather than an individual phenomenon, one that
develops over time, with deep roots in the traditions of a given society.
Reading is not, in my view, an act, or even a process, but a system, a highly
complex cultural system that involves a great many considerations beyond

9
10 William A. Johnson

the decoding by the reader of the words of the (author’s) text. I therefore
speak deliberately of ‘‘reading culture’’ rather than of ‘‘literacy’’ or of ‘‘writing
technologies,’’ both because that is my preferred focus and because I think
mistaken the sort of analysis that starts from the viewpoint either that writing
is a watershed phenomenon, and thus the world divides into literate and
nonliterate, or that writing is a ‘‘technology’’ that can be studied in isolation,
as though the whole of reading were the interaction between the technology
and the user of that technology. That reading involves many variables, that
there are in fact many types of reading, that reading is a complex cultural
system, may seem very obvious propositions. But these points have been so
willfully neglected by such a long and distinguished line of researchers that I
do not think they can be overemphasized here at the start of these reflections.
Indeed, what prompts me to this more general and theoretical consider-
ation of reading culture is my deep dissatisfaction with the terms in which
researchers have typically sought to describe both ancient and contemporary
reading cultures. As I ponder these matters, I come increasingly to believe
that the very missteps made in analysis of the ancient world, some of which
are generally recognized as missteps today, are being repeated, mutatis mu-
tandis, in contemporary commentary on the great paradigm shift going on
about us, often called the ‘‘electronic revolution’’—a central aspect of which
is, in my view, a shift in the paradigm of the contemporary reading culture.
As a cultural historian, I have come to hope, then, that a better understanding
of how best to describe ancient reading culture may help as we seek to
understand the changes in our own. But more detail on that after I have done
a bit of historical mortar as background for this inquiry.

Some Typical Fallacies in the Analysis of Reading Culture

A prominent strategy in the analysis of reading culture has for a long
while been a focus on literacy, usually opposed to the oral culture, or ‘‘oral-
ity,’’ that literacy is said to replace. Much of the early debate on this subject
concentrated, remarkably, on classical Athens, and one thinks in particular of
that annus mirabilis, 1963, which saw seminal publications by the anthropolo-
gist Jack Goody (‘‘The consequences of literacy,’’ written with Ian Watt, a
professor of English literature) and the classicist Eric Havelock (Preface to
Plato). These scholars and their followers have presented a variety of formu-
lations over the years, but in essence their mode of analysis seeks to establish a
consequential relation between, on one hand, the so-called rise of rational-
ism in classical Athens and, on the other, the introduction of the alphabet
and of literate modes of thought into the previously oral society. Because the
 Reading Cultures and Education 11

use of writing leads to a self-consciousness about elements of the spoken

language (Havelock 1963; compare Olson 1994), or because writing sets state-
ments in a form in which the texts can be compared (Goody and Watt 1963,
pp. 304–45), or because writing lends itself to di√erent habits in the ac-
cumulation of information, such as the creation of lists (Goody 1977), writing
is taken to be directly causative in the genesis of an analytic, critical frame of
mind and thus causative of things like logical analysis and detailed proof. It is,
then, this self-conscious mode of analysis that leads to the cataclysmic mo-
ment when (we are told) myth is replaced by history, rhetoric by logic and
philosophy, magic by science—when by virtue of the ‘‘rise of rationalism’’ the
traditional mythological way of looking at things is cast o√ in favor of the
modern conception of the world. At the most speculative reach of this set of
theories, the liberalizing e√ects of the new rationalist intellectualism are
taken so far as to account for the rise of democracy.
The specific problems with these theories scarcely need rehearsing (see
Thomas 1992, pp. 15–28). For one thing, it seems fairly obvious that, if
literacy is in itself such a powerful agent, we might expect the e√ects in
ancient Greece to show up outside of Athens and Ionia. In any case, detailed
research into oral cultures has not been able to a≈rm the sort of clear-cut,
essential di√erences posited between literate and oral societies (for example,
Finnegan 1988). Likewise, cognitive psychologists (I think in particular of the
classic 1981 study by Scribner and Coles, The Psychology of Literacy) have
failed to find general cognitive di√erences in memory, classification, or logi-
cal abilities following the introduction of writing systems into an oral society.
Theories that rely on literacy as an agent of change are therefore not in
good repute these days—but they continue to be enormously influential. Per-
haps, then, it is worth a brief look at what is wrong, in methodological terms,
about this sort of analysis. First is the easy misstep into technological de-
terminism. Whether the focus has been on the alphabet, on literacy generally,
or, as more recent and nuanced studies have done (see especially Olson 1994),
on the technology of writing itself, there is a tendency to see cultural change
as the immediate and indeed necessary result of the introduction of a tech-
nology. This reductionist tendency among researchers is hardly restricted
to studies of ancient Greece. Amusingly similar conclusions about what
‘‘causes’’ the development of the modern conception of the world can be
found, for instance, in Eisenstein’s book on the printing press (Eisenstein
1979), and, most recently, in Saenger’s account of how the introduction of
spaces between words in medieval manuscripts led directly to the rise of
complex, abstract thinking—this time in the twelfth century (Saenger 1997).
In commentary on our era, a similar tendency presents itself. The computer
12 William A. Johnson

is made the ‘‘cause’’ of a great many developments: loss of memory, loss of the
ability to attend oral discourse, loss of expertise in reading. But, we ought to
ask, in what sense is the introduction of technology directly causative?
The second methodological fallacy I would like to highlight is that of the
replacement technology. In the orality-and-literacy debates I have just re-
viewed, a major problem has to do with the terms of the analysis. What is oral
is seen as opposite to what is written. Thus oral society is taken to be opposite
to literate society, and we coin a term, ‘‘orality,’’ to oppose to ‘‘literacy.’’ We
can now say, although the meaning is not very clear, that literacy opposes
orality and that as literacy rises, orality falls, that is, that literacy replaces
orality. This may sound reasonable enough, in its vague way. But culture is
not a zero-sum game. Scholars have spent a great deal of e√ort establish-
ing exactly that: oral culture changes as literate culture is established and
changes, but oral culture hardly goes away or even diminishes. Literacy and
orality are simply not contrastive terms in any strict sense. (For striking
medieval examples, see Carruthers 1990, and, more generally, Thomas 1992
and Finnegan 1988.)
Once again this sort of misstep is replaying itself in the contemporary
debate. From Marshall McLuhan onwards, we encounter repeated sugges-
tions that we are moving away from a fully literate era back to a ‘‘more oral’’
(or sometimes ‘‘more visual’’) society (McCluhan 1962). This sort of observa-
tion, which we now see to be problematic in itself, is often linked to predic-
tions or anxieties about the demise of the printed book. In 1981, for example,
I sat in a conference at UCLA in which the chair of the Classics Department
confidently declared that the printed scholarly book would be unknown by
the end of the decade and that new printed books of any type would soon be
rare; more recently, in the Times Literary Supplement I read of the anxieties
about what will happen as CD-ROMs (inevitably, it seems) replace printed
books (Miller 1998, p. 7; compare Bolter 1991, pp. 1–3). But in contrast to the
hype of the ‘‘paperless o≈ce’’ is the reality of o≈ces awash in paper; in
contrast to our anxieties about the demise of the book is the fact that more
books are published and sold today than ever before. This is the replacement
technology fallacy. The paradigm shift of the electronic revolution is often
compared to sweeping changes brought on by the printing press and the
automobile. We must be careful, however, about the terms of the analogy.
The horseless carriage did replace the carriage with horse, and the printing
press did replace the handwritten book. But electronic technology is not a
replacement technology for printed materials in the same way. The auto-
mobile, after all, did not usher in a new age of proliferation of countless
horses; nor did the printing press engender the production of numberless
handwritten manuscripts. But the computer has accompanied an explosion
 Reading Cultures and Education 13

in printed texts—alongside an explosion in digital texts. Likewise, in ancient

Greece the use of writing and written records over time surely interacted with
and helped change the use of oral discourse, but it did not obliterate it by any
means and arguably did not diminish it. Written discourse is no more, for
most purposes, a replacement technology for oral discourse than, for most
purposes, CD-ROMs are a replacement technology for books.

The Sociocultural Construction of Reading

If we reject the sort of sweeping cultural analysis that charts movements
from oral to literate and back to oral or onward to visual, or that focuses
reductively on one part of the reading system, how then do we go about our
analysis, and how does that analysis intersect with the topic announced in the
title, namely, education? In analyzing the reading culture of the ancient
Greeks, I seek to move from the known to the unknown, to see what di√eren-
tiates reading in antiquity from the reading-from-a-printed-book model so
familiar to us. As my work in this area has continued, I have found that the
basis of analysis grows ever wider, for I must look not simply into cognitive
models of how the reader interacts with the physical text but also at the
physical setting of reading, the aesthetics of reading production and ap-
prehension, the sociology of the groups participating in the reading—in
broad terms, the negotiated, sociocultural construction of reading. In trying to
understand what may be di√erent about contemporary reading experiences
in the new techno-culture, a similarly broad-based analysis seems to me
essential. And—what makes the analysis important for the topic before us—
as an educator, I am increasingly struck by how this broad-based analysis
intersects materially both with problems in learning and with the sort of
sociocultural dynamics that are central to the educational enterprise. Again, I
take as my starting point an example from ancient Greece.
To begin, let us focus on how the physical tool, in ancient terms the book
roll, interacts with our understanding of the system of reading. It will help
simplify matters if we focus on a subset of ancient reading culture, so I will
restrict my remarks to literary prose texts. Now, the ancient literary book is
striking in several respects. (For full details on the ancient book, see Turner
1987; Johnson 2003.) The sort of book I have in mind is, of course, not a
bound, printed volume but a handwritten roll, held horizontally, written in
columns that were regular, left- and right-justified, and very narrow (about
fifteen to twenty-five letters, that is, two to three inches, in width, and six to
ten inches in height). The letters of the text were clearly, often calligraphically,
written, but otherwise undi√erentiated: that is, there were no spaces between
words. The main sentence breaks were marked by a horizontal stroke at the
14 William A. Johnson

left edge of the column, but there was otherwise little or no punctuation. And
nothing to mark larger structures: no paragraph breaks, no running heads,
no page or column numbers. The lines were divided rationally, at the end of a
word or syllable, but otherwise the column was organized as a tight phalanx
of clear, distinct letters, each marching one after the other to form an impres-
sion of continuous flow, the letters forming a solid rectangle of written text
alternating with narrower bands of white space. The visual e√ect was, then,
not unlike a strip of 35 mm film. The product seems, to the modern eye,
something almost more akin to an art object than a book; and, with its lack of
word spaces and punctuation, the ancient book roll seems spectacularly, even
bewilderingly, impractical and ine≈cient as a reading tool.
This may seem an exceedingly strange way of putting together a book. But
it was no flash in the pan. This idea of the literary book prevailed for almost
one thousand years in the Greek tradition and was eventually adopted by the
Romans in the early empire. How do we account for this type of book within
the context of a stable and sophisticated reading culture? How is it that the
Greeks were unable for so many centuries to adopt such obviously useful aids
as word spaces, punctuation, paragraphing, and the like in their literary
texts? Surprising as it may seem, the conclusion is hard to avoid that there
was something about the reading culture that felt no need for these things,
that in terms of the total system of reading, such habits as omitting spaces
between words worked, and worked well. We cannot suppose that the Greeks
were too naïve or primitive or stupid to think of word spaces or punctuation
or structural markers. In ancient elementary school exercises, word division
and punctuation are often found (Cribiore 1996). Ancient documentary texts
often have elaborate visual structural markers, as needed. In the earliest
Roman texts, word separation is the norm; in fact it is universal so far as we
know (Wingo 1972), and it is telling that the Romans in imperial times chose
to discard word spaces in the writing of their literary manuscripts, a choice
they would hardly have made if it interfered fundamentally with their read-
ing system. Such a development today—the discarding of spaces between
words—is simply inconceivable. We see clearly, then, that there is something
essentially di√erent about the ancient reading system, that the paradigm of
reading was di√erent.

Defining the Di√erence: A New Paradigm of Reading

How do we define this di√erence in the paradigm of reading? Without
going into too much detail, I will summarize briefly a few ways in which I
approach the definition of the paradigm for ancient reading, because it is
 Reading Cultures and Education 15

important as model and background to defining the paradigm shift in our

own reading culture. One model I use is the cognitive one. I find, for in-
stance, very interesting and probably significant that the extremely narrow
column of text in an ancient book matches the amount of data that we tend
to pre-process as we read. Our eye, as it reads, takes in chunks of about fifteen
to twenty characters beyond the point of acute focus, and our brain uses this
advance data for preliminary ‘‘decoding’’ of the script—and indeed fifteen to
twenty characters is also how far ahead the eye typically keeps in front of the
text as we are reading aloud (Saenger 1997, pp. 1–17 and bibliography). To this
compare the fifteen to twenty letters that constitute the width of a prose
column in an ancient book roll (Johnson 2003, pp. 167–77). We find, then, at
least one possible reason why the lack of word spaces in literary texts did not
seem to bother readers in antiquity: the text was already broken up into
su≈ciently digestible chunks by the narrow column widths. But this sort of
technical observation is of limited use in and of itself and must be combined
with other ways in which ancient reading di√erentiates itself if we are to make
sense of the reading culture. The strangeness of the book roll intersects with
the fact that literary texts were commonly ‘‘read’’ in the sense of a small group
listening to a ‘‘performance’’ (as it were) by a lector (often a slave trained for
this very purpose). Thus a performer, in e√ect, was usually interpreting the
text, and the sort of direction for pause and tone given by the author’s
punctuation in our texts was left to the reader’s ‘‘professional’’ interpretation
of the lines. We need also to consider the fact that ancient literary books were
hardly ever consulted in part or for reference. Thus the need for a text with
clear structural markers did not exist. We might note, finally, that the very act
of the calligraphic and expensive book being read to a group of the educated
elite acted as a symbol of what bonded and validated the group as Greek,
educated, cultured. That is, the physical aspect of the book, taken as an
element in the reading system as a whole, seems to make sense in its own terms.
How, then, do we turn this sort of analysis around and use it in the
understanding of reading today and in particular for our understanding of
reading in an electronic environment? My first step is hesitating, unsure,
treading well beyond my expertise. But it seems widely assumed in cognitive
studies that the experiences of reading in an electronic environment and
from a printed text are essentially the same. In fact, computer-controlled
reading experiments form the backbone of a certain thread of research in
cognitive psychology. Of course many parameters must be approximately
equivalent, such as the way in which the eye in reading lines of text jumps at
intervals across the page or virtual page (‘‘the saccadic movement’’) or the
amount of text on the periphery of the point of acute focus that the eye is able
16 William A. Johnson

to take in. Yet computer screens are visually complex in a way that the printed
page is not (Bolter 1991, p. 11), and reading on a computer screen seems, to me
at least, cognitively somewhat di√erent. Most computer users, for example,
rarely read long, continuous text from a computer screen. Why is that? I for
one would like to know a great deal more about how the interactions with the
electronic interface do or do not a√ect the mechanics of the reading experi-
ence, that is, to what extent reading within the context of a hypertextually
linked environment, a multiple-tasking environment, or an environment
with a heavy emphasis on icons in lieu of text changes the very way in which
our eyes move about and attempt to read the virtual page in front of us.
Cognitive studies of such matters are (so far as I have been able to find)
mostly lacking, but even as we mark this down as a desideratum, we have
already come to recognize that the cognitive model will be but one facet of
the complex reading system I seek to describe. Even in the context of the
physical (or virtual) printed text, cognitive models will only get us so far. In
the discussion of the way in which the ancient physical text interacted with
the system of reading, we found at once that it was necessary to discuss not
simply the way in which the reader cognitively processed the narrow columns
of letters without word division. We needed also to think about how the
physical features of the text, not simply lack of word division but lack of
punctuation or structural markers, interacted with the demands made on the
text—as for example the fact that the text was read aloud by a trained reader
and the fact that the text was not used for reference. This striking contrast,
the utterly undi√erentiated unstructuredness of the ancient physical text,
suggests, by virtue of its radical di√erence, what seems to me the most char-
acteristic feature of the contemporary reading experience. Our habit of read-
ing is so di√erent that we find it hard even to imagine a reading system that
lacks physical structural markers, whether at the level of sentence, paragraph,
or chapter. Essential to our own idea of reading is detailed, authorially con-
trolled structure.
I will go further: there seems today to be an increasingly radical focus on
the structural components of texts, and in many ways it is exactly the promi-
nence of these structural features, or what I will call navigational aids, that in
some ways strikes at the core of the contemporary reading culture. I highlight
this feature because the strong presence of navigational aids seems to me not
simply characteristic of contemporary texts but fundamental to many con-
temporary reading experiences. That the Internet is often cruised by Net-
scape Navigator is no coincidence in the metaphor I am pro√ering: it
seems quintessential to much reading today that we are ‘‘browsing,’’ that is,
 Reading Cultures and Education 17

looking over a huge amount of written data in order to digest the informa-
tion, or, more commonly, to find among the deluge of data the information
we seek. This habit of information seeking is, I think, profound. But let me
emphasize, again, that the computer does not cause it. In classical scholarship
we find that the elaboration of structure and indices designed to facilitate
information retrieval first became prominent in German texts of the end of
the nineteenth century. It is simply that the electronic media are particularly
well adapted to this sort of reading habit and in turn promote exactly these
habits—this is one aspect of the synergy that I seek to define in describing the
various aspects of our changing reading culture. Thus, to give a very particu-
lar instance, the sudden and wide adoption of ‘‘frames’’ in Internet sites can
be seen as a way of taking the information in a site and exposing it struc-
turally on a constant basis. As the reader works through the specific pages of
information, there is always at hand this exposed structure, this navigational
aid to the site, since the table of contents or indexing function is no longer an
optional helpful feature for the reader but essential, on an ongoing basis, to
the system of reading. That is, the navigational aid has in some sense become
primary.
Much of what professors in the humanities seem to have to teach their
students is how to read more slowly, more linearly, with more attention to the
details of the text as it plays out, since these reading habits are increasingly
uncommon and, for many tasks, sad as it may seem, rather irrelevant. A
couple of years ago, a student, to my astonishment, told me that she found it
easier to read, and easier to remember the things she read, on an Internet site
than in a book. At the time, I was floored. It assaulted every idea I had of the
advantages of print, of the metaphor I held to be dominant of the perma-
nence of the printed book versus the transitoriness of the computer screen, of
my internal picture of the frenetic, interrupted, distracted nature of com-
puter reading, in which one is constantly tempted away from the text toward
a new link, a new text. But I am belatedly coming to understand, I think, that
a computer text, with its exposed structure and ‘‘sound bite’’–sized bits of
text, can facilitate comprehension and retention for someone growing up
under the new paradigm of reading, where the navigational aids are primary,
the informational digest secondary, and the text itself only tertiary. To a
certain extent, that is, my student and I were talking past each other, since we
meant something very di√erent by ‘‘reading,’’ being in, as it were, rather
di√erent reading cultures. It is this sort of thing I mean when I state that the
‘‘electronic revolution’’ seems in part informed by a basic change in the
paradigm of reading.
18 William A. Johnson

What the New Reading Culture May Mean for Education

The educational consequences of the paradigm shift, if I am right in my

own cultural reading, cannot be underestimated. A strong awareness of this
shift in the way students process and retain text can help in e√ective learning.
For example, in accommodating to the reading culture of the Web, I have
found that my class notes (which I routinely post to the Web) become in-
creasingly organized in a top-down fashion, increasingly structured, increas-
ingly oriented toward the presentation of a radical synopsis of the material,
even in the teaching of linear texts such as Homer or Vergil. Jay Bolter has
argued, perhaps rightly, that the hypertextual environment encourages an
aphoristic tendency, since each structural element in a written text becomes a
linkable unit, thus potentially segregated from the linear sequence (Bolter
1991, p. ix). The tendency to aphorism, to expression in kernels of thought,
need not be reductionist. In my own experiments with Web-based teaching
of classical literature, I have found that use of on-line lecture notes has had
the following consequences:
1. The weaker students find it easier to absorb and understand the material,
since they no longer have to rely on their own muddled outlines and digests.
The passivity may not in every way seem desirable, but I can report not only
that many weaker students perform better but also that they pay more atten-
tion in class and seem much more involved in, and thoughtful about, these
di≈cult ancient texts.
2. Since the ‘‘information’’ is available on the Web, I feel free both to
include a great many more items, such as examples from the text, or links to
other resources, than we could ever work through in class. Moreover, I have
increasingly felt free to skip simpler sections altogether when class time seems
better spent exploring one section in more detail.
3. Since the students are explicitly responsible for the Web materials, rather
than what we may or may not cover in class, all the students are exposed to
many more ideas than we can cover in class, and the stronger students work
through the many examples—which is the only way to begin to get at the
richness of texture of the literary text underlying my schematic analyses. The
professorial narrative becomes, then, reduced and restructured on one hand
but expanded and made more open-ended on the other. It no longer matches
what goes on in the classroom. I can teach both at an elementary and an
advanced level more or less simultaneously. Much more of the learning,
suddenly, begins to take place outside of the classroom: the grappling with
the Web-based professorial narrative seems to lead to a great deal more
interaction among the students outside of class, as they work through these
 Reading Cultures and Education 19

materials, and the ‘‘class’’ becomes at times almost like a commentary on the
‘‘virtual class’’ in which we are all studying. That this sort of class can be so
successful—a class where linear presentation is constantly interrupted or
ignored altogether, where ‘‘kernelized’’ analysis is given precedence, even
though we are studying literary texts, where there is constant diversion to-
ward illustrative or related materials—begins, however, to make sense in the
context of the new reading culture. It is not, in truth, the kind of class that I
would prefer to take, but it is the kind of class that most of my students seem
to prefer. The success of the class, in short, stems from the fact that I am
attempting to work with, rather than fight against, the new habits of reading.

Sociocultural Aspects of Reading and Education

The physical and conceptual text is, however, only one part of the
reading system, and arguably not the most important part. I want to turn
back now to broaden the description of reading culture, for I have repeatedly
broached, but never fully entered into, a discussion of one of the most
fundamental aspects of the reading system, namely, the sociocultural con-
struction of reading. As we shall see, I consider the sociocultural component
not only crucial to reading culture generally but of special importance to the
question of education. But first we need to gain a more vivid idea of this
dimension of reading. As is my wont, I will start, this time quite briefly, with
the ancient reading experience, again focusing on the reading of a prose
literary text.
The ancient reader (by which I mean the educated person listening to the
trained lector) is comfortably disposed: lying on a couch, relaxed, and often,
perhaps usually, among friends. The attitude is not one of digesting informa-
tion, or of a scholastic critical reaction, but either pure aesthetic pleasure or
that sort of intellectual contention familiar to us in its extreme (and ide-
alized) form from such sources as Plato and Athenaeus. The enjoyment of the
lection is perhaps often interrupted by remarks or even debate: the text is a
guide and springboard to conversation and discussion, constituting intellec-
tual and aesthetic pleasure in a tightly bound, elite group. Note how social
and textual event interlock. The physical text is beautiful, the reading is slow,
the lector is well trained for the task of bringing the text alive to the hearers,
the reading unfolds along with the book roll itself in a sequential and leisurely
manner for a limited time, the comfortable setting bespeaks the wealth,
culture, and refinement of those sharing in the experience, the di≈culty of
the text bespeaks their education. As a sociocultural system this reading
experience begins to make sense, to take on flesh.
20 William A. Johnson

Now let us at a leap jump from antiquity back to our own time and
compare and contrast this ancient scenario with a type of reading we all
know well, namely, reading within the context of a humanities classroom.
There are no couches, no continuous oral reading from the text, no lux-
uriousness (at least not at my university), but the scene is oddly similar in
certain ways: the use of a text as a springboard to intellectual discourse; the
tightly bound group that validates itself using a text that is important to a
shared sense of culture; the comfortable feeling of the selectness of the group.
But now let’s turn this scene around and ask, pointedly: Why is it that
students so commonly find di≈cult texts such as Homer’s Iliad or Plato’s
Republic (or Dante or Baudelaire or Goethe) deeply exciting within the con-
text of a class? If they do not read these texts in college, most of these same
people, after all, as forty-something stockbrokers or business executives, are
not likely to find these texts very engaging. Why do young men and women
who find Greek or Sanskrit or Swahili captivating as students rarely read
these languages once they graduate? What specifically is the nature of the
magical web that a good teacher is able to spin?
A great deal, I think, depends on the sociocultural construction of the
reading group, and much of what we do in higher education, both institu-
tionally and individually, is to work toward the construction of particular
types of reading groups. In a successful humanities class, we are not so much
teaching texts as creating a reading society, which finds self-validation in the
negotiated construction on meaning from these texts. That is, institutionally
we work, for instance, toward creating the disposition that knowledge of and
directed engagement with particular humanities texts is socioculturally im-
portant: it is part of what you need to know to be ‘‘educated,’’ to become part
of the cultured elite of society. Individually, we as teachers work toward
creating the disposition that a particular text (the one we are studying in the
class) is meaningful and relevant: it is part of what you need to apprehend
the knowledge and to experience that sense of meaningfulness that bonds the
group together as a productive, self-validating unit. These group dynamics—
the construction of the attitude in the reader that Plato is important, that
Plato should be interesting—are fundamental to education and fundamental
to the high intellectual experience. Reading is the individual’s construction of
meaning, but it is never wholly interior; rather, sociocultural influences al-
ways inform the meaning that the reader seeks to construct, as anthropolo-
gists and linguists increasingly recognize (compare, for example, Heath 1983;
Street 1984; and Finnegan 1988).
It is here that I find the new techno-culture so deeply exciting for educa-
tion. Techno-culture seems to me a rich opportunity if looked on in light of
 Reading Cultures and Education 21

the construction of reading communities. Although central to what we do as

educators, construction of communities is tough in the context of much
humanistic education, whether the less common languages and literatures
(today comprising once-popular languages such as French, German, and
Russian) or the many other subjects increasingly perceived as ‘‘impractical’’
(including philosophy, world religion, or art history) and thus often wanting
for students beyond the introductory level. What I have in mind goes, how-
ever, beyond courses that use the Internet to link up solitary or small groups
of students into a virtual class. The sense of a techno-culture that underlies
many contemporary reading communities, from chat rooms to discussion
groups to loose networks of e-mail correspondents, is potentially a powerful
tool that can extend beyond the construction of typical class activity and a
tool that can be used to access groups beyond the eighteen-to-twenty-two set
that American education typically targets. American arts councils, whether
they promote opera, symphony, art, or theater, have long been successful at
creating a life-long sense of engagement from targeted persons. Interestingly,
many of these people do not in fact have a profound passion for art or music
or theater; rather, they share an interest that seems to them culturally impor-
tant. For our purposes, what is interesting is the participation of the arts
council itself in the negotiation and construction of the cultural group, in
promoting and indeed exploiting that important sense of a culturally self-
validating society.
Imagine an America in which it becomes part of the social scene of the
educated not simply to go to the occasional opera or play but to do cool
intellectual things over the Internet, an America in which a normal cultural
aspiration for any educated person—the cool (that is, socially validating)
thing to do—is to get together with your intellectual group and discuss
language, literature, and culture. Imagine a set of educators who conspire, as
it were, to use the Internet to link and organize persons with specific shared
interests, to facilitate and promote directed techno-cultural communities,
who spread many seeds in the hope that various small techno-cultural com-
munities will take root. Imagine intellectual groups, be they speakers of
Ukrainian, students of antiquity, or alumni of Oberlin, who use the techno-
cultural community to get that sense of an ongoing, broadly shared mission,
even as they are also able to identify local people with whom they could share
more conventional social intercourse.
I am a classicist: I am no seer, I bear no words from Apollo, and this
scenario may well seem fantastic. But let us turn, one final time, to the
ancient Mediterranean. In a provincial watering hole deep in the Egyptian
desert, at a town named Oxyrhynchus, a group of ancient Greeks, in the
22 William A. Johnson

midst of an Egyptian culture for generations, used the reading of Homer,

Euripides, Sappho, and Aristotle as a means of maintaining their sense of
cultural identity, of keeping their Greekness—but also as a means of main-
taining their sense of education and civilization even while the desert en-
croached on all sides. Two millennia later in Britain, in the early days of the
twentieth century, the Egypt Exploration Fund, a nonacademic, profession-
ally diverse club of the intellectually curious, would meet frequently, and with
great excitement, to study these same texts as they were being dug from the
sands of Oxyrhynchus—in part an expression of their sense of belonging to
the educated class of a great imperial power.
If sociocultural groups could find life-long intellectual community in
provincial Greco-Roman Egypt and in Edwardian England, why not in tech-
nologically sophisticated America? The sense of belonging to an educated,
cultured group can be a powerful force and is one that we, as educators, labor
to construct but one that we let pass out of our hands the moment our
charges leave the university. We may be able to make better progress both in
our ability to connect with undergraduates and in the goal of life-long hu-
manistic learning if we start to think of the use of technology not simply as a
classroom or research tool but as a part of how contemporary people negoti-
ate the construction of reading communities and if we try to think through
specifically how to use to advantage the cachet and ‘‘sex appeal’’ of the tech-
noculture to facilitate the construction of broadly based, continuing, spe-
cialized communities of readers.
In this brief essay, I have taken time to look at only a couple of aspects of
our contemporary reading culture, a culture that seems, if I am right, to be
shifting in an important way. Obviously, to do a proper job I would need to
look at the reading system from a greater variety of viewpoints, to try to see
what other elements I can isolate that di√er from the reading-from-a-printed
book paradigm. These would include the use of graphic symbolism, the
influence of video and audio technologies, the aesthetics of electronic tools
and how aesthetics influence sociocultural constructions, the intersection of
virtual and interpersonal communications in the reading society, and so
forth. But I hope that even this very prolegomenal treatment of our con-
temporary reading culture su≈ces to suggest some ways in which thinking
through reading as a system may be able to help as we try to sort out the
paradigm shift going on about us.

This written record developed from two oral papers delivered in the fall
of 1998, one at Oberlin College (a celebration of the career of Professor
Nathan A. Greenberg), the other at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
 Reading Cultures and Education 23

(a conference titled ‘‘Transformations: Technology, Foreign Languages, and

Undergraduate Education’’). The sections on ancient reading culture rely on,
and in some cases summarize or paraphrase, the more detailed presentation
of evidence and analysis in Johnson (2000). The comments on teaching with
Web-based materials reflect in particular my experience in a series of classical
civilization courses taught at Bucknell University from 1997 to 1999.

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Olson, D. (1994). The World on Paper: The Conceptual and Cognitive Implications of
Reading and Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Saenger, P. (1997). Space Between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading. Stanford: Stanford
University Press.
Street, B. V. (1984). Literacy in Theory and Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Thomas, R. (1992). Orality and Literacy in Ancient Greece. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Turner, E. G. (1987). Greek Manuscripts of the Ancient World. 2d ed., revised by P. J.
Parsons. London: Institute for Classical Studies, University College London.
Wingo, E. O. (1972). Latin Punctuation in the Classical Age. The Hague: Mouton.
 2

Literacy and Cognition

mark turner

Fifty thousand years ago, more or less, during the Upper Paleolithic
Age, our ancestors began the most spectacular advance in human history.
Before then, we were a negligible group of large mammals. Afterward, we
were supreme.
The archaeological record suggests that during the Upper Paleolithic our
ancestors acquired a cognitively modern human imagination, furnishing
them with the ability to invent new concepts and to assemble new and
dynamic mental patterns. As a result, human beings developed art, science,
religion, culture, refined tool use, and language. What happened? How can
we human beings do what we do?
Before this period, the knowledge an animal could have and the range of
behavior it could enact were, relative to the standards of modern human
beings, sharply limited. But in the Upper Paleolithic, one species became
astonishingly di√erent. Our ancestors became ‘‘cognitively modern,’’ that is,
able to learn and to know many di√erent things that are not shared through-
out the species. It became possible for some members of this species to
develop and deploy complex conceptual structures that were unavailable to
other members of the species. Literacy became an issue, if by ‘‘literacy’’ we
mean a learned ability to deploy elaborate conceptual structures (such as a
particular language, or writing, or the concept of a particular set of rituals)

24
 Literacy and Cognition 25

that some other members of the species lack and that they cannot come to
possess and deploy unless they undertake a protracted process of learning.
Before the Upper Paleolithic, there were basically no phenomena of literacy.
Afterward, literacy became crucial to human existence.
This is our condition now. Some of us write English and use dollars, others
write Spanish and use pesos. Some of us read, and some of us do not. Some of
us know very precisely how to behave during Easter in Moscow, others know
how to behave during Easter in Paris, and others know how to behave during
a seder in Los Angeles.
Gilles Fauconnier and I, working in collaboration, have proposed that
what happened during the Upper Paleolithic was this: an apparently small
group of human beings finally reached an evolutionary stage in which they
attained a more powerful level of a cognitive ability possessed to some degree
by all mammals. This cognitive ability is ‘‘conceptual integration,’’ and the
advanced version of conceptual integration that makes literacy possible is
‘‘double-scope integration.’’
The ability to do conceptual integration at the double-scope level made it
possible for us to develop many individual conceptual products that look
superficially quite di√erent, such as grammar and mathematics, art and reli-
gion, ritual and humor, watches and money, marriage and science. ‘‘Literacy’’
is a measure of how some human beings di√er from others in the conceptual
structures they can deploy. Those di√erences are the result of our capacity for
double-scope integration. Other species do not have this capacity and so do
not have literacy or illiteracy.
The cognitive operation of conceptual integration, also called ‘‘blending,’’
is very complex. It has a set of overarching goals, a set of constitutive princi-
ples, and a set of guiding principles. There is a taxonomy of types of concep-
tual integration networks. Most important, the cognitive operation of con-
ceptual integration does not work in the way we might have imagined.
In this chapter I cannot possibly introduce the principles of conceptual
integration at any depth. I shall instead illustrate conceptual integration with
a few examples, referring the reader for details to Turner (1996), Fauconnier
and Turner (1998), Turner and Fauconnier (1999), and especially the blend-
ing Web site (Turner 1999–), which presents research on the subject by many
researchers in many fields. Then I shall discuss the importance of advanced
forms of conceptual integration for learning a language and for learning
prose styles.
It is easy to give immediately obvious examples of conceptual blending.
Such examples are all around us, and the conceptual integration networks on
which they rely play a major role in our mental existence. But these examples
26 Mark Turner

are profoundly misleading, since they give the impression that we recognize
blending as it happens. On the contrary, almost all blending happens below
the horizon of observation. These obvious examples are also misleading in
other ways, since any one of them has special features, inviting us to make the
error of thinking that those special features are essential to the operation of
conceptual blending.
Consider, as one of these misleadingly pyrotechnic examples, a little car-
toon in which snails are playing hide-and-seek (‘‘Pretzel Logic’’ by Frank
Deale). The seeker snail, covering his eyes and leaning against a rock, is
counting ‘‘1000, 999, 998, 997, 996, 995, 994, 993, 992, . . .’’ while all the other
snails are headed o√ to find hiding places. In one input mental space, there
are snails, which move slowly. In another input mental space, there are
human children playing hide and seek. As always in conceptual integration,
we construct at least a partial mapping between these inputs. In this case, the
individual snails correspond to the individual human children.
These two mental arrays are fundamentally opposed in nearly every way
one would want to explore, and they certainly do not share an organizing
conceptual frame. Snails do not play elaborate social games, or count num-
bers, frontwards or backwards, for example. In the blend, there is new mean-
ing, emergent structure: snails can play hide-and-seek, have language and
numbers, can count out loud, and so on. They count ordinal numbers in a
way that is alien for the seeker child in hide-and-seek, who (at least as I know
the game) does not count backwards from one thousand. The act of counting
backward from one thousand during hide-and-seek originates in complex
ways from conceptual integration. When we read the cartoon, we notice im-
mediately that the snail counts backward from a thousand and know imme-
diately that this takes a very long time and infer that this pattern of counting
is necessary because the snails who are trying to hide need a lot of time in
which to do so. We probably do not notice that the reason the snail counts
backward is that a cartoon speech bubble with ‘‘1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, . . .’’
would not communicate to us that the snail is in the process of counting all
the way to one thousand. So the cartoonist, who wants us to construct the
right snails-playing-hide-and-seek blend, in which the snails are going to
take nearly forever to hide, makes the seeker snail count backward from one
thousand, so we will infer unambiguously that the count is long.
Snail hide-and-seek is a ‘‘double-scope’’ integration network. In such a
network, the inputs have di√erent (and often clashing) organizing concep-
tual frames (snails in a garden versus children playing hide-and-seek), and
the blend has an organizing frame that includes part of each of those frames
and also has emergent structure of its own. In a double-scope integration
 Literacy and Cognition 27

network, the organizing frames of both inputs make important contribu-

tions to the blend, and their sharp di√erences o√er the possibility of rich
clashes. Far from blocking the construction of an integration network, such
clashes o√er challenges to the imagination, and the resulting blends can turn
out to be highly creative.
Once we recognize a particular conceptual integration network, we often
come to see that it is merely one instance among many of a slightly abstract
mental template that is deployed repeatedly throughout the culture. In fact,
knowing such templates is the major component of cultural literacy. For
example, the particular snail-hide-and-seek blend that we construct to make
sense of the cartoon is merely one instance among many of a conceptual
integration template in which one conceptual input has a nonhuman species
or object, the other has a human activity, and the blend has the blended
object engaged in something close to the human activity, but the blended
activity is modified in some crucial and often humorous way because the
object is unlike the human being in some crucial way. For example, another
cartoon shows an octopus parent playing ‘‘Which Hand?’’ with its o√spring
(‘‘Speed Bump’’ by Dave Coverly). The octopus parent has all eight of its
tentacles behind its back and is holding a treat in one of them. It says to its
o√spring, ‘‘I’ve got a treat for you . . . Guess which tentacle!’’ The glum
o√spring is thinking, ‘‘I hate this game!’’ In another ‘‘Speed Bump’’ cartoon,
one twelve-inch ruler says to another, in a comment on two other rulers who
are walking hand in hand, ‘‘Looks like true love . . . In fact, I hear he
converted to metric for her.’’ And in another, called ‘‘Worm Moms,’’ the
mother worm says to her little worms, who are with her inside some under-
ground worm tunnel, ‘‘It’s pouring rain outside, and you two are in here
watching TV? Out! Out!’’ Gary Larson is of course the recognized master of
this genre of cartoon.
These funny little blends are immediately intelligible and seem almost
trivial. In fact, they are exceptionally complex double-scope integrations that
develop considerable emergent structure and require powerful inferencing.
We do not reject them as insane even though they blend two things that
conflict very strongly.

Grammatical Constructions
Although these little cartoons can seem unimportant, language is
surely all-important for the study of literacy, and just as surely very di≈cult
to analyze. The central problem of language is that a system of relatively few
forms must be able to prompt for the construction of vast ranges of meaning.
28 Mark Turner

How have human beings solved this problem? The answer is, by sophisticated
conceptual integration. Expressions do not encode meanings but instead
prompt us to use our mental power to do conceptual integration to construct
meaning. The scope and range of conceptual integration is vast, and so a few
grammatical forms can be used to prompt for vast ranges of meaning con-
struction. Literacy, or at least one fundamental type of literacy, consists
of knowing how the particular grammatical constructions of a language
prompt for particular conceptual integration networks. This knowledge
must be learned. What human beings do not have to learn is the ability for
conceptual integration itself. That ability is part of human nature.
Consider, as an illustration, the English resultative construction. I will
consider here how knowing this grammatical construction depends on
knowing a conceptual integration network and how to use it. My analysis is
meant to stand for a general analysis of the way in which learning a language
is learning systems of prompts for conceptual integration networks.
Suppose that there is a room, and that its walls and ceiling are not pristine
white, and that Kathy acquires and gathers appropriate painting materials,
prepares the room, and performs many actions of rolling or brushing white
paint with instruments until the white paint covers major surfaces in the
room, that the paint dries, and that thereafter the walls and ceiling of the
room are pristine white. These unintegrated events are given a high degree of
integration when expressed as ‘‘Kathy painted the room white.’’ We know this
sentence does not mean that she painted it because it was white, or painted it
because she is white, or painted it with primer so that the painters would later
be able to paint it white, but rather that she painted it with the result that it
became white. Even though there are no individual words in the expression
that explicitly indicate that white is a result, the grammatical form itself
assigns white to the role result and the room to the role patient.
This grammatical construction, the English resultative, analyzed by Gold-
berg (1995), has a conceptual half and a formal half. Its conceptual half is the
blending of two conceptual inputs. The first input is an integrated conceptual
schema, R, which structures prototypical cases such as paint and dye. R
includes an agent role a (for example, Kathy); a role e (for example, painted)
that subsumes causal action, means, manner of the action, and caused event
leading to a result for a patient; a role x (for example, the room) that sub-
sumes both the patient of the action and an entity for which there is a result r;
and a result role r (for example, white). Formally, in English, R is associated
with the form NP1 V NP2 ADJ, as follows: a with NP1, e with V, x with NP2,
and r with ADJ. ‘‘Mike pressed the wallpaper flat.’’
Input 2 is an unintegrated causal sequence. In this sequence, there is an
 Literacy and Cognition 29

agent a % who acts; this act is causal for a second conceptual bundle, contain-
ing an entity x % for which there is a result r %, and some event e % whose result
is r %.
In the cross-space mapping between input R and input 2, unproblemat-
ically, a corresponds to a %, x corresponds to x %, and r corresponds to r %. Also,
e in R corresponds to some not uniquely specified e % in input 2. The blend
has roles a &, e &, x &, and r &, mapped from R. Content for those roles is
provided by input 2. The blend inherits syntax from R, so that a & is assigned
to NP1, x & is assigned to NP2, and r & is assigned to ADJ. But for e &, there is
more than one possibility, because there is more than one way to map e.
If e in input R corresponds to the agent’s action in input 2, the blend
inherits that action, and a verb expressing it will show up in the V position of
the syntactic form NP V NP ADJ, as in ‘‘She kissed him unconscious’’ or ‘‘She
rubbed it raw.’’ Kiss and rub are not prototypical instances of R, but the
construction evokes a blending with R as an input, and so both of these
expressions evoke resultative meanings.
If e is mapped to the causal link, an appropriate causal verb appears, as in
‘‘She made the floor dirty’’ or ‘‘She got him angry.’’
If e is mapped onto the event resulting in r %, a verb expressing that event
will show up in the V position, as in ‘‘She ran them ragged’’ (where she herself
did not run), ‘‘She burned it black,’’ ‘‘She bent it straight,’’ ‘‘She bled him dry,’’
and ‘‘She boiled the pan dry’’ (note that she did not boil and that she did not
boil the pan).
Conceptual blending allows other elements from input 2 to map onto e &
and to be reflected by a single verb form:

‘‘She hammered it flat.’’ Hammer expresses action but points to the instru-
ment associated with that action.
‘‘She set it free,’’ ‘‘She set the flame low.’’ Set expresses causality and points to
something about the aspect of the event.
‘‘She dimmed the background grey.’’Dim expresses not only the result but
also something about the manner of the event the result of which is that the
background is dim, as with ‘‘She cleared the screen blank.’’
‘‘She worked it loose.’’ Work expresses something about the aspect of the
action.

The blend of input R and input 2 yields emergent structure at the gram-
matical level, in the form of new roles added to verbs. Consider Goldberg’s
example, in which John’s talking loudly causes him to become hoarse. We
cannot use the verbs available for the unintegrated input 2 to say *‘‘He talked
himself,’’ meaning that he was the patient of his talking. But the roles in the
30 Mark Turner

blend are mapped from input R, so the blend does have a role for patient, x &,
and, in the syntax inherited from R, patient is assigned to NP2. In the blend,
talk does have a patient role and a result role, added to it by the construction.
So we can say, ‘‘He talked himself hoarse.’’
The English resultative construction depends on conceptual integration in
an even more fundamental way: input R is itself already a conventional blend.
I shall call its two input spaces input R1 and input R2. Input R1 has an agent
whose act causes an object to move along a path from one location to an-
other. Input R2 has an agent whose act causes an event with a result for a
patient. In the blend R, the patient is an object and the result is its new
location. R is an abstract, entrenched, and conventional metaphoric blend. In
R, changing state is moving along a path from one location to another. As
Goldberg observes, this path is single and in a single landscape. Goldberg
explores the unexpected consequences of the fact that R has this emergent
structure. Specifically, although a causal action can have multiple results, the
singleness of the path prevents us from getting two co-occurring resultatives
of one action, as in the ungrammatical sentence *‘‘She kicked him black-and-
blue dead,’’ on the reading that black-and-blue and dead both result from
kicked (and black-and-blue is not a determiner for dead). Also, the path’s
restriction to a single landscape requires that resultatives do not combine
with directional phrases that would yield both a path in a spatial landscape
and a path in a metaphoric landscape of states, as in the ungrammatical
sentences *‘‘Sam kicked Bill black and blue out of the room’’ and *‘‘Sam
kicked Bill out of the room black and blue,’’ both on the reading that black
and blue is the result of kicked. But since prepositional complements that are
not directionals do not result in paths in two landscapes, they can combine
with resultatives, as in the grammatical sentence ‘‘He loaded the wagon full
with hay.’’
We see, then, that the English resultative construction prompts for concep-
tual blending that has as one input R, but R itself is the blend of R1 and R2.
Multiple stages of conceptual blending are in fact extremely common in the
kinds of knowledge that count as instances of human literacy.
Consider now the English ditransitive construction, also analyzed by
Goldberg (1995), which prompts for double-scope conceptual integration
with remarkable ferocity. A prototypical example of the ditransitive is ‘‘Bill
gave Mary a gift.’’ The verb gave by itself evokes a conceptual schema in which
a causal agent, by some means, successfully causes the transfer of an object to
a recipient. I will call this schema D. The verb pour does not by itself evoke D
(‘‘The water poured out of the drain pipe’’), yet when pour is used in the
ditransitive syntax (‘‘Bill poured Mary some wine’’), the construction itself
evokes schema D.
 Literacy and Cognition 31

The use of the English ditransitive prompts us to integrate, conceptually,

some unintegrated events with the highly integrated ditransitive schema D,
to create a blend O. But the organizing schema of O is double-scope, that
is, it takes organizing schema–level structure from both inputs. Although
Goldberg does not use the model of conceptual integration, I think various
double-scope blends are implicit in her analysis, as follows. If D and the
organizing schema for the unintegrated events match closely, their blend
takes its organizing schema from both of them. This is the case for verbs that
inherently signify acts of giving an object (give, pass, hand, serve, feed), verbs
of instantaneous causation of ballistic motion (throw, toss, slap, kick, poke,
fling, shoot ), and verbs of continuous causation in a deictically specified
direction (bring, take). But if the verb is a verb of refusal (refuse, deny) as in
‘‘The boss denied Bill a raise,’’ then the blend O takes the potential recipient
and the potential patient from D but takes the causing of the not receiving
from input 2, with the result that D is counterfactual with respect to O. If the
verb is a verb of giving with associated satisfaction conditions (guarantee,
promise, owe), then the blend takes from input 2 kinds of causal structure for
reception that are not in D. If the verb involves a scene of creation (bake,
make, build, cook, sew, knit ) or a verb of obtaining (get, grab, win, earn), then
O takes from D intention to cause the recipient to receive the patient, but not
necessarily success. If the verb is a verb of permission (permit, allow), then O
takes enablement from input 2 rather than successful causation from D. If the
verb is a verb of future transfer (leave, bequeath, allocate, reserve, grant ), then
the blend takes future transfer from input 2 rather than successful causation
of present reception from D. These blends fall into conceptual classes, each
class with its own two-sided organizing schema and each with its associated
classes of verbs. These double-scope blends, and the use of the ditransitive to
evoke them, can become conventional, so that the ditransitive can, as a
matter of convention, be associated not only with the prototypical schema D
but also with these various abstract double-scope blends.
In fact, this survey only scratches the surface of the conventional blends
that have D as one input. Again, although Goldberg does not use the model
of conceptual blending, there is a taxonomy of metaphoric blends implicit in
her analysis, as follows: (1) D is conventionally blended with an abstract
schema for causing an e√ect for an entity; this produces a metaphoric blend in
which the e√ect is an object and causing the e√ect for the entity is causing the
object to come to the entity. This conventional blend inherits the ditransitive
syntax from D, so that one can say, ‘‘The medicine brought him relief ’’ and
‘‘She gave me a headache.’’ (2) D is conventionally blended with a schema for
communication; this produces a metaphoric blend, analyzed by Reddy (1979),
in which meaning is an object and communicating it to someone is giving it
32 Mark Turner

to a recipient. This conventional blend inherits the ditransitive syntax from

D, so that one can say, ‘‘She told Jo a fairy tale.’’ (3) There is a conventional
blend of motion of an object toward a recipient with perceiving. In the blend,
perception is reception of the ‘‘perception’’ by the recipient. This metaphoric
blend is exploited as a basis for producing a more detailed metaphoric blend,
with D as one input and causing someone to perceive as the other. In this more
detailed blend, perception is an object and causing someone to perceive it is
transferring it to him. This inherits the ditransitive syntax from D, so that
one can say, ‘‘He showed Bob the view.’’ (4) D is conventionally blended with
directing an action at another person. In this metaphoric blend, the action is
an object and directing it at another person is transferring it to her as recip-
ient. This inherits the ditransitive syntax from D, so that one can say, ‘‘She
threw him a parting glance.’’ (5) There is a conventional metaphoric blend of
constructing an object out of parts and developing an argument. In this blend,
facts and assumptions used in arguing are parts used in constructing. This
is exploited as a basis for a more detailed blend, of D and granting facts
and assumptions to an arguer. In this more detailed blend, granting a fact
or assumption to the arguer is transferring it to her as recipient. This in-
herits the ditransitive syntax from D, and so one can say, ‘‘I’ll give you that
assumption.’’
There is an interesting final case. Goldberg observes correctly that in ex-
pressions such as ‘‘Slay me a dragon,’’ one of the input schemata has an agent
performing an action for the benefit of someone else, and the first postverbal
noun refers to the beneficiary while the second postverbal noun refers not to
what the recipient receives but rather to what the causal agent acts on. I o√er
the following explanation, which I think follows the spirit of Goldberg’s
analysis closely even though it uses the model of conceptual blending and a
slightly di√erent array of input schemas. D inheres in a more detailed but
highly conventional schema D%. In D%, someone brings a benefit to someone
by transferring an object to him. ‘‘Bill gave me a dollar’’ is typically under-
stood as meaning not only that a dollar was transferred but that a benefit (for
example, the ability to purchase) was conferred by means of the transfer.
‘‘Mary poured Bob a glass of wine’’ is typically understood as meaning not
only that a glass of wine was poured with the intention of transfer but
also that a benefit (for example, wherewithal for pleasure or nourishment)
was intended to be conferred by means of pouring and (intended) giving.
Of course, D is not always an instance of D%: ‘‘My child handed me his banana
peel’’ is probably D but not D%. Nonetheless, the ditransitive syntax is at-
tached not only to D but also to D%, and, depending on vocabulary and
context, it is usually a good strategy to try to interpret ditransitive syn-
 Literacy and Cognition 33

tax as evoking D%. In the ditransitive construction, the second postverbal

noun always refers to the patient (metaphoric or not) of the causal agent’s
action, whether or not that patient is also the transferred object (metaphoric
or not). What happens in ‘‘Slay me a dragon’’ or ‘‘Sing me a song’’ is a double-
scope, selective projection to the blend, with D% as one input. We project
from D% to the blend a causal agent performing an action on an object
(metaphoric or not) and the intended consequent conferral of a benefit on
someone, but we do not project from D% the reception of an object. The
blend inherits the ditransitive syntax associated with D%, and, as always in the
ditransitive, the patient of the causal action is assigned to the second post-
verbal noun.
Using their basic human ability for double-scope blending, the speakers in
di√erent language communities develop di√erent grammatical construc-
tions. Even when these constructions seem to be related, there are typically
crucial di√erences between them. The French resultative construction has a
di√erent grammatical form (‘‘Catherine a peint le mur en blanc’’). The En-
glish caused motion construction (‘‘He kicked the ball over the fence,’’ ‘‘He
floated the boat across the pond,’’ ‘‘We teased him out of his mind’’) is much
more promiscuous (linguists say ‘‘productive’’) than its French cousin: the
English construction can be used to express kinds of causal action and caused
motion that are not accepted by the French version. In English, when we
want to express caused action, we say something like ‘‘I made Paul run,’’ but
the French would say, ‘‘J’ai fait courir Paul.’’ Hebrew, as Nili Mandelblit
(1995) shows, has a di√erent set of constructions to convey such a meaning.
Hebrew verbs all consist of a skeleton of consonants (the ‘‘root’’), slotted into
some vowel pattern or prefix + vowel pattern. Such a vowel or prefix + vowel
pattern is called a binyan. The consonants carry the ‘‘core meaning’’ of the
verb. There are seven major binyanim in Hebrew (the capital C’s stand for the
root consonants to be inserted): CaCaC, CuCaC, CiCeC, niCCaC, hiCCiC,
huCCaC, and hitCaCeC. Mandelblit shows that each binyan prompts for
a particular blending schema. Consider, for example, the binyan hiCCiC
(termed hif ’il ), and the root verb r-u-c, meaning ‘‘run.’’ These two con-
structions are blended at both the conceptual and the formal levels to give a
resultant construction, a verb, hiruic, written (or rather transliterated) heric,
that means ‘‘make to run.’’ In this way, Hebrew can express ‘‘I made Paul run’’
using a single main verb, because its grammatical constructions di√er from
those available for this purpose in English. Learning a language is learning
these blending templates. Moreover, as Israel (1996) shows, grammatical con-
structions develop diachronically through changes in the blending patterns
they evoke.
34 Mark Turner

Reading, Writing, and Style

Reading and writing—‘‘literacy’’ in the everyday sense—of course de-
pend absolutely on the existence of grammatical constructions, which have
been produced through blending, but they also depend on blending in an-
other crucial way. In reading and writing, we see physical marks on stone or
paper or a computer screen, and these marks are circulated through the
community. By themselves, these marks are meaningless. But someone who
is literate in the everyday sense has a general blending template for writing
and reading. In it, one input has someone talking and the other input has
some medium with marks, and in the blend, the marks and the speech are
fused in impressive ways. The projection to the blend from the inputs is
creative and imaginative. The blending template does not say what is being
said in the blend. For that, we need a material anchor: a particular letter,
book, or inscription. The emergent integrated activities of writing and read-
ing are strikingly di√erent from speech in nearly all aspects. But the blend
and the speech input are connected, and we know therefore how to interpret
the blend. When we look at writing, or when we write, we are dealing cog-
nitively not only with distinguishing between physical marks but instead with
a conceptual blend in which these marks are integrated with speech.
Because we know di√erent human-scale scenes in which someone is
speaking, there are di√erent prose styles. Thomas and Turner (1994; see
classicprose.com) analyze prose style from this theoretical perspective. Here,
I will present briefly, as an illustration, one particular prose style, classic style.
Here is an example:
Mme. de Chevreuse avait beaucoup d’esprit, d’ambition et de beauté; elle
était galante, vive, hardie, entreprenante; elle se servait de tous ses charmes
pour réussir dans ses desseins, et elle a presque toujours porté malheur aux
personnes qu’elle y a engagées. (La Rochefoucauld, Mémoires [See Thomas
and Turner 1994, p. 16])

(Madame de Chevreuse had sparkling intelligence, ambition, and beauty in

plenty; she was flirtatious, lively, bold, enterprising; she used all her charms
to push her projects to success, and she almost always brought disaster to
those she encountered on her way.)

In classic style, the input with someone talking has a particular and rich
structure. In it, one person is talking to another and the occasion is informal.
The speaker’s motive is that he has recognized some truth worth presenting,
and his entire purpose is to present that recognition to the listener, to make it
possible for the listener to see what the speaker has seen. The speaker and the
 Literacy and Cognition 35

listener are both competent. They are symmetrical in having a classic intel-
lect; indeed, the listener could take the next turn in the conversation and
perform similarly. The speaker thinks before speaking, and what he says,
although it is talk, is perfect, and naturally so, since it is the product of a
classic mind in full command of a language. Language, in this conception, is
adequate to present anything. The truth the speaker has recognized is not in
any way radically contingent on point of view or idiosyncrasy—it may be that
the listener does not know Hebrew or never lived during the seventeenth
century, but these are merely accidental impediments to recognition; the
listener has no fundamental incapacity to recognize what the writer recog-
nizes. The speech is a perfect window on its subject: it shows what it has to
show. The speaker does not acknowledge that his style or language might
itself be the subject of attention. The occasion is not rushed, although the
speech has the e≈ciency that comes of having a classic mind. Neither speaker
nor listener is pressured by deadlines or a job to do, such as making invest-
ments, fixing a machine, or completing a school assignment. That is, the
presentation is not subordinate to some other purpose. The speaker has no
need to persuade the listener that he should listen, and in fact no ambition to
persuade the listener: all the speaker has to do is present the recognition
properly, and the listener will see.
This input is the model for the style. It is the one that is assumed by the
style. In fact, there do exist a few occasions that actually come close to fitting
this assumed scene. One is being in the field with a human guide, who points
things out. Consequently, field guides and guidebooks are a natural genre for
the use of classic style. Here is an example:
Northern Shrike (Lanius excubitor)

Unusual among songbirds, shrikes prey on small birds and rodents, catching
them with the bill and sometimes impaling them on thorns or barbed wire
for storage. Like other northern birds that depend on rodent populations, the
Northern Shrike’s movements are cyclical, becoming more abundant in the
South when northern rodent populations are low. At times they hunt from an
open perch, where they sit motionless until prey appears; at other times they
hover in the air ready to pounce on anything that moves. (John Bull and John
Farrand Jr., The Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Birds, Eastern
Region [see Thomas and Turner 1994, p. 115])
But prose styles are generally useful, because we can blend that assumed
scene with other, conflicting scenes. Suppose, for example, that the real situa-
tion is a job-seeking letter: the roles of interviewer and candidate are pro-
foundly asymmetrical, the motive is greed, the purpose is to persuade the
36 Mark Turner

employer to o√er the job, and so on. This real situation can be blended with
the assumed scene to give a style in which the candidate in fact wants nothing
from the interviewer, is entirely confident, and enjoys symmetry with the
interviewer. The applicant is simply presenting truth. The result can be a very
compelling letter. It is crucial to the power and utility of a prose style that its
existing blending template for integrating marks in a medium with a model
scene of speech can be further blended with a quite conflicting actual scene to
produce a multiple-scope blend that in crucial ways includes some of the
structure of the model scene.
What defines a general style is its conceptual blending template, not sur-
face features. It is not possible to teach literacy in a prose style by teaching
surface features. For example, students who try to understand classic style as
a bundle of surface features cannot begin to locate the common stylistic basis
of the following classic examples:
The self cannot be escaped, but it can be, with ingenuity and hard work, dis-
tracted. (Donald Barthelme, ‘‘Daumier’’ [Thomas and Turner 1994, p. 163])
Malgré son état liquide, le lait doit toujours être considéré comme un aliment
et non comme une boisson . . . (Nouveau Larousse Gastronomique [Thomas
and Turner 1994, p. 39])
(In spite of its liquid state, milk must always be considered as a food and not
as a beverage.)
Although a dirty campaign was widely predicted, for the most part the politi-
cians contented themselves with insults and lies. (Julian Barnes on the 1992
British parliamentary elections [Thomas and Turner 1994, p. 87])
Hemorrhoids are actually varicose veins in the rectum. (First sentence of an
anonymous brochure in a medical clinic, 1992 [Thomas and Turner 1994,
p. 122])
A portrait now in the possession of the descendants of the Kiryu clan shows
Terukatsu sitting cross-legged on a tiger skin, fully clad in armor with a
European breastplate, black-braided shoulder plates, taces and fur boots. His
helmet is surmounted by enormous, sweeping horns, like a water bu√alo’s.
He holds a tasseled baton of command in his right hand; his left hand is
spread so wide on his thigh that the thumb reaches the scabbard of his sword.
If he were not wearing armor, one could get some idea of his physique;
dressed as he is, only the face is visible. It is not uncommon to see likenesses
of heroes from the Period of Civil Wars clad in full armor, and Terukatsu’s is
very similar to those of Honda Heihachiro and Sakakibara Yasumasa that so
often appear in history books. They all give an impression of great dignity
and severity, but at the same time there is an uncomfortable sti√ness and
formality in the way they square their shoulders. (Junichiro Tanizaki, The
 Literacy and Cognition 37

Secret History of the Lord of Musashi, translated by Anthony H. Chambers

[Thomas and Turner 1994, p. 129])
Palabra por palabra, la versión de Galland es la peor escrita de todas, la más
embustera y más débil, pero fue la mejor leída. Quienes intimaron con ella,
conocieron la felicidad y el asombro. Su orientalismo, que ahora nos parece
frugal, encandiló a cuantos aspiraban rapé y complotaban una tragedia en
cinco actos. Doce primorosos volúmenes aparecieron de 1707 a 1717, doce
volúmenes innumerablemente leídos y que pasaron a diversos idiomas, in-
cluso el hindustani y el árabe. Nosotros, meros lectores anacrónicos del siglo
veinte, percibimos en ellos el sabor dulzarrón del siglo dieciocho y no el
desvanecido aroma oriental, que hace doscientos años determinó su innova-
ción y su gloria. Nadie tiene la culpa del desencuentro y menos que nadie,
Galland. (Jorge Luis Borges, ‘‘Los traductores de las 1001 noches’’ [Thomas
and Turner 1994, p. 145])
(Word for word, Galland’s version is the worst written, the most fraudulent
and the weakest, but it was the most widely read. Readers who grew intimate
with it experienced happiness and amazement. Its orientalism, which we now
find tame, dazzled the sort of person who inhaled snu√ and plotted tragedies
in five acts. Twelve exquisite volumes appeared from 1707 to 1717, twelve
volumes innumerably read, which passed into many languages, including
Hindustani and Arabic. We, mere anachronistic readers of the twentieth
century, perceive in these volumes the cloyingly sweet taste of the eighteenth
century and not the evanescent oriental aroma that two hundred years ago
was their innovation and their glory. No one is to blame for this missed
encounter, least of all Galland.)
But once a student is introduced to the general blending template that defines
classic style, the student can typically begin to work with some facility in that
style in a matter of weeks.
A cultural blending template, once learned, operates with great complexity
but almost entirely unconsciously. When the cognitively modern child,
equipped with its human ability for blending, comes into the world, it under-
goes an extremely active period of mastering the blending templates the
culture has to o√er—grammatical constructions, rituals, forms of representa-
tion, arithmetic, dance, and material anchors such as money and watches. It
uses basic cognitive abilities to make sense of the cultural world in which it is
immersed and learns these blending templates even though no one in its
environment, least of all the child, can articulate with any sophistication what
they are. After about age three or four, it spends a lifetime taking these blends
apart and putting them back together in useful and creative ways. Immersed
in a culture, it picks up the available styles, including the prose styles.
This picture of how we learn presents a great challenge to the teacher of
38 Mark Turner

foreign languages and cultures, not to say to the student. To learn a foreign
language, and actually to learn its cultural styles, is to learn to deploy its
conceptual blending schemes—for grammatical constructions, for reading,
for writing, and for styles of writing. People who actually command these
blending templates have no need to articulate them consciously or explicitly,
and for the most part cannot. The child immersed in the culture has every-
thing it needs, but the mature learner, operating at a distance from the
culture, faces potentially lethal scarcity of the necessary cultural presenta-
tions. How can such a learner actually learn? The method I use of teaching
students to be literate in a prose style consists of analyzing for them the
cultural blending templates that define the style, in the hope of giving them a
place to start. Then I invite them to spend all their time trying to enact the
style on the fly. I discourage them from trying to revise their failures. I tell
them that a prose style cannot be attained by tinkering with surface features
and that any attempt to work in that fashion will produce only parody and
finally paralysis. Besides, it’s no fun. As you might expect, at the outset, my
students often wonder how on earth they will learn what it is I have to teach,
even what on earth I have to teach, but it works for me, and, to all ap-
pearances, for them. Many of their e√orts are available in the student gallery
of the Web presentation at »http://www.classicprose.com….
The research on conceptual integration suggests a number of lines for the
development of foreign language teaching. First, an analysis of the grammar
of a language consists principally—and for the adult foreign language learner
almost entirely—of the presentation of the grammatical constructions avail-
able in the language to be deployed as cues to the mental construction of
meaning. These constructions are blending templates that have been con-
trived by a culture. They have their own characteristic patterns of matching
between input spaces, selective projection to the blend, and emergent mean-
ing in the blend. It is plausible that the learner could acquire both the rudi-
ments and the idiomatic nuances of constructions more rapidly and more
surely by studying their blending templates and the relationships between
them. In this respect, the theoretical analysis of integration networks might
provide pedagogically useful instruments. It might provide principles of
grammar that look less arbitrary. A textbook might include blending dia-
grams in the text, in the exercises, and in the appendix.
Second, research on conceptual integration might lead us to comparative
cognitive study of languages in a manner reminiscent of traditional compara-
tive grammars. The benefits of comparative analysis of similar constructions
in related languages are evident for the theorist, but they might also be
substantial for the learner.
 Literacy and Cognition 39

And last, blending analysis applies not only to the grammar of a language
but also to the styles that are available in that language. The foreign language
learner typically wishes to learn both. A blending analysis can, at least in
principle, present them in a unified manner.
Of course, a child does not learn his or her mother tongue by reading a
book full of blending templates. He or she learns directly, immersed in the
environment and in the use of the language. But the adult learner of a foreign
language needs all the help he or she can get.

References
Fauconnier, G., and M. Turner. (1998). Conceptual Integration Networks. Cognitive
Science 22(2): 133–87.
Goldberg, A. (1995). Constructions: A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument
Structure. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Israel, M. (1996). The Way Constructions Grow. In Conceptual Structure, Discourse, and
Language, edited by A. Goldberg, pp. 217–30. Stanford, Calif.: CSLI.
Mandelblit, N. (1995). Formal and Conceptual Blending in the Hebrew Verbal System: A
Cognitive Basis for Verbal-Pattern Alternations in Modern Hebrew. Department of
Cognitive Science, University of California at San Diego.
Reddy, M. (1979). The Conduit Metaphor. In Metaphor and Thought, edited by
A. Ortony, pp. 284–324. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Thomas, F.-N., and M. Turner. (1994). Clear and Simple as the Truth: Writing Classic
Prose. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Turner, M. (1996). The Literary Mind: The Origins of Thought and Language. New York:
Oxford University Press.
———. (1999–). Web site: Blending and Conceptual Integration. »http://blending.stanford
.edu….
Turner, M., and G. Fauconnier. (1999). A Mechanism of Creativity. Poetics Today 20
(3):397–418.
Turner, M., and F.-N. Thomas. (1998–). Web site: »http://classicprose.com….
 3

Literacy as a New Organizing Principle

for Foreign Language Education
richard g. kern

In their recent analysis of articles related to the teaching of literature

published in The Modern Language Journal from 1916 to 1999, Kramsch and
Kramsch (2000) identify the publication of the Coleman Report (Coleman
1929) as a pivotal moment that marked a dissociation of literacy from the
study of literature. Whereas literature had traditionally been treated pri-
marily in terms of its philological and aesthetic value, the focus of reading
was now shifting toward what Kramsch and Kramsch characterize as a ‘‘liter-
acy orientation’’ aimed at developing reading skills to access the informa-
tional content of texts. At the time, few literary scholars entered the debate
spurred by the Coleman Report, leading Kramsch and Kramsch to observe
that ‘‘Precisely at the historical juncture when the reading of texts could have
brought the concerns of literary scholars and language teachers closer to-
gether, the gap was wider than it had ever been’’ (560).
This gap continues to exist today, commonly manifesting itself as a
di√erence in goals, orientation, and methods between lower-division
study (language) and upper-division study (literature). Introductory- and
intermediate-level language teaching generally strives to promote commu-
nicative competence. But what is considered ‘‘communicative’’ has often
been associated primarily with face-to-face, spoken communication. Al-
though the best-known models of communicative competence, such as those

40
 Literacy as a New Organizing Principle 41

of Canale (1983), Canale and Swain (1980), Savignon (1983), and Bachman
(1990) certainly include written as well as oral discourse in their purview, the
operationalization of the notion of communicative competence in textbooks
and programs has tended to emphasize oral communication. Furthermore,
there are ample instances in the professional literature that would appear to
highlight speech in the definition of communicative competence. For exam-
ple, although Hymes makes no e√ort to exclude written communication, he
nevertheless has written, ‘‘I should therefore take competence as the most
general term for the speaking and hearing capabilities of a person’’ (1971,
p. 16). Terrell (1977) defined communicative competence as the ability to
‘‘understand the essential points of what a native speaker says to him in a real
communication situation and can respond in such a way that the native
speaker interprets the response with little or no e√ort and without errors
that are so distracting that they interfere drastically with communication’’
(p. 326). Brown (1994) has defined communicative competence as ‘‘a dy-
namic, interpersonal construct that can only be examined by means of the
overt performance of two or more individuals in the process of negotiating
meaning’’ (p. 227). So although reading and writing are widely acknowledged
as important skills, students tend to do relatively little genuine reading and
writing (as opposed to reading and writing practice) before their advanced-
level coursework. And what is considered competence tends to be strictly
functional and performance-based (Can the student accurately comprehend
key pieces of information? write a story in the past tense? provide supporting
evidence for ideas?). There is an emphasis on meaning, but there is too
seldom any systematic analysis of how particular meanings are created. In
other words, relatively little attention is paid to the work of interpretation—
and even less to the cultural bases of interpretation processes and communi-
cation practices.
As we stand at the threshold of the twenty-first century, the time is right to
close the gap, to reunite literacy with literacy study in order to improve the
coherence of language curricula. What this reuniting requires, however, is a
reconceptualization of ‘‘literacy’’ such that both social and individual dimen-
sions of written expression are explored, leading to language programs that
value aesthetic as well as e√erent reading (Rosenblatt 1978) and that teach
students to know the di√erence.
What is called for is a reassessment of our priorities in teaching foreign
languages at the college and university level. Broadly, I am arguing for a
renewed and invigorated focus on written communication. In stating this
desideratum I should clarify from the outset that I am not in any way sug-
gesting that spoken communication should be de-emphasized. Quite the
42 Richard G. Kern

contrary. But in my experience it seems clear that learners cannot develop the
kind of spoken communication ability required in academic settings without
a serious commitment to the study of written communication, because much
of the former for academic purposes requires ‘‘literate’’ sensibilities about the
particular ways the foreign language can be used in written contexts. Oral
communication also requires a familiarity with the cultural premises that
underlie communication in another society, which, in the absence of lived
experience in that society, are often discovered through texts.
Communicating successfully in another language means shifting frames of
reference, shifting norms, shifting assumptions of what can and cannot be
said, what has to be explicit and what should be tacit, and so forth. In other
words, using another language e√ectively involves thinking di√erently about
language and communication. The question is this: How can one begin to
understand another way of thinking, how can one be sensitized to di√erent
cultural frames, when one is in a classroom far from where the language is
spoken? One approach, and the one proposed in this chapter, is reading,
writing, and discussing foreign language texts.
Writing and the visual media are the primary means by which we learn
about and relate to past and present worlds outside our immediate commu-
nity. When we examine the particular ways language is used to capture and
express ideas and experiences, we not only learn a great deal about the
conventions of the language—we also begin to glimpse the beliefs and values
that underlie another people’s uses of language.
Given that language learners in academic settings have limited oppor-
tunities to use the language, it is incumbent on educators to provide learners
with the broadest and deepest exposure to the language that we can with the
limited time we have available. Texts—written, oral, visual, audiovisual—
o√er learners new aesthetic experiences as well as content to interpret and
critique. The point is not simply to give them something to talk about (con-
tent for the sake of practicing language) but to engage them in the thoughtful
and creative act of making connections between grammar, discourse, mean-
ing, between language and content, between language and culture, between
another culture and their own—in short, making them aware of the webs,
rather than strands, of meaning in human communication.
Recently there have been signs of renewed interest in the use of literature,
stylistic analysis, and translation to promote language learning. This renewed
interest is not merely a return to traditional grammar translation or to the
early twentieth-century ‘‘reading method,’’ which ultimately focused on mas-
tering linguistic forms. Rather, it is a move to consider the importance, on
one hand, of elements of individual expression such as style and point of view
 Literacy as a New Organizing Principle 43

and, on the other, social dimensions of literary and nonliterary texts as

expressions of cultural codes and ideological overtones. We are thus con-
cerned with, as Paulo Freire (Freire and Macedo 1987) put it, reading the
word and reading the world—and reading the world through the word.

Why ‘‘Literacy’’?
‘‘Literacy’’ is not a word commonly used in the context of foreign
language teaching, and therefore some explanation of why I have chosen the
word is in order. I use ‘‘literacy’’ to convey a broader scope than the terms
‘‘reading’’ and ‘‘writing’’ and to allow for a more unified discussion of rela-
tions between readers, writers, texts, culture, and language learning. When
we focus on literacy, we consider reading and writing in their social contexts
of use. We frame reading and writing as complementary dimensions of writ-
ten communication—and so we focus on their interrelatedness rather than
on their separateness as distinct skills.
There are two benefits to this perspective: first, it o√ers a broadened un-
derstanding of what reading and writing are, how they relate to one another,
and how they are connected to other dimensions of language learning and
language use; second, it o√ers a way to narrow the long-standing pedagogical
gap that has traditionally divided what we do at the early levels of language
teaching and what we do at the advanced levels. That is, it o√ers a way to
reconcile the teaching of ‘‘communication’’ with the teaching of ‘‘textual
analysis.’’ And this reconciliation can potentially help us improve the degree
of coherence across levels of the language curriculum.
That said, there is one significant disadvantage to using the word ‘‘lit-
eracy’’—namely, that it is a noun. As we all know, the e√ect of nominalization
is to transform processes into things. Our understanding of literacy has, in a
sense, su√ered at the hand of literacy’s own devices—by virtue of its represen-
tation in written language. When we reify what is really a dynamic interac-
tion of linguistic, cognitive, and social processes, we can be misled in how we
understand—and how we teach—literacy.

Multiple Perspectives on Literacy

What, then, should we mean by ‘‘literacy’’? The first thing one notices
when one tries to define the term is that its meaning varies with time, place,
and social context. Ostensibly literacy refers to reading and writing, but how
it is characterized varies tremendously. Literacy can be viewed as a technique,
as a set of language skills, as a set of cognitive abilities, as a group of social
44 Richard G. Kern

practices, or, as Deborah Brandt (1990) has put it, ‘‘a part of the highest
human impulse to think and rethink experience in place’’ (p. 1). From a
historical perspective, the meaning of literacy is also variable. Its etymologi-
cal root, litteratus, referred to learnedness in Latin, but literacy has in certain
periods simply referred to the ability to write one’s own name.
From a cross-cultural perspective, the functions, values, and practices as-
sociated with literacy also vary significantly. What literacy means in working-
class communities in rural South Carolina (Heath 1983) is not the same as
what it means for the Vai people of Liberia (Scribner and Cole 1981), which is
in turn quite di√erent from what literacy is for Punjabis in London (Saxena
1994) or for Moroccans in Koranic schools (Wagner 1993). Consequently, a
number of scholars have argued that it does not make any sense to talk about
literacy as a monolithic phenomenon. Instead, we should be talking about
literacies in the plural.
Research on literacy and literacies has expanded considerably in the past
twenty years and is represented in disciplines as diverse as anthropology,
history, education, rhetoric and composition, psychology, linguistics, and
sociolinguistics. From this cross-disciplinary research a new general charac-
terization is emerging. Literacy is construed as a collection of dynamic cul-
tural processes, rather than as a static, monolithic set of psychological at-
tributes. It is both public and private, both social and individual. It is about
the creation and interpretation of meaning through texts, not just the ability
to inscribe and decode written language. And it is ‘‘critical,’’ involving a spirit
of reflective skepticism.
This conception of literacy is not necessarily one to which language teach-
ers widely subscribe. And it is certainly not how most language students
think of literacy. What is more familiar is an understanding of reading and
writing as separate skills to be practiced along with the skills of speaking and
listening. Reading represents the skills involved in decoding words in order to
get meaning, and writing represents the skills involved in putting words on
paper in prescribed ways in order to produce meaning. This view, though of
course partially true, tends to limit reading and writing to straightforward
acts of information transfer. For many foreign language students, the de facto
goal of reading is uncovering the meaning, the theme, the point of a text. That
is to say, what the teacher reveals in class. Similarly, writing is all too often
about capturing in the right words the summary or the analysis of something
they have read.
Because our conceptions of literacy will inevitably influence how we teach
reading and writing in the classroom (Farley 1995), it is essential to under-
stand that literacy is more than a set of academic skills, more than inscribing
 Literacy as a New Organizing Principle 45

and decoding words, and more than prescribed patterns of thinking. It is

neither natural, nor universal, nor ideologically neutral, but culturally con-
structed. It is precisely because literacy is variable and intimately tied to
sociocultural practices that it is so important in our teaching of language and
culture.

Literacy in the Context of Foreign Language Teaching

Given this background, let us further explore the gap that divides lan-
guage curricula by examining how literacy tends to be handled in academic
foreign language programs.
At the lower levels of the curriculum, literacy tends to be viewed in terms
of basic skills. Teaching is typically focused on correctness and convention, on
one hand, and on functional activities (reading classified ads, weather re-
ports, timetables, signs, menus, and so forth) on the other. Students also read
short stories and journalistic texts, but the goal of this reading is often vocab-
ulary and grammar practice rather than interpretation or aesthetic apprecia-
tion. Meaning tends to be treated as a property of the text and therefore to be
deemed unproblematic once the reader has mastered the linguistic elements
of the text. This text-centric view of literacy was clearly reflected, for example,
in the 1980s version of the ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines for reading and
writing, which dealt largely with text characteristics rather than what learners
actually do when they read and write.
At the upper end of the curriculum, two additional strands of literacy
come into play. One we could call the high cultural strand, which involves the
transmission of cultural knowledge and the development of aesthetic appre-
ciation, literary sensibility, and a cultivated spirit. The study of a particular
literary canon, for example, is thought to foster this kind of literacy. The
other strand, which we could call the cognitive skills strand, involves the
development of textual analysis skills and critical thinking.
So, whereas the kind of literacy taught in introductory and intermediate
courses is basically concerned with textual description, the kind taught in
advanced courses is more analytical and critical. This shift in emphasis can
contribute to a lack of articulation between introductory and advanced
course work—a gap that can frustrate students and imperil enrollments in
upper-division courses. The problem, however, extends beyond a mere shift
in approach. It is ultimately tied to the way in which we tend to conceptualize
literacy. In the context of foreign language education, the views of basic skills,
high culture, and cognitive skills all share a number of important limitations.
First, they reify literacy as an end product of instruction instead of as a
46 Richard G. Kern

variable set of processes constrained by textual, cognitive, and social factors.

As a result, teachers’ e√orts become oriented toward defining boundary lines
of a minimum acceptable standard. How well do learners have to read and
write (in general) to be considered functional? How many novels do they
have to read, how many cultural ‘‘facts’’ do they have to absorb, to be deemed
(culturally) literate? Which, and how many, analytical skills and strategies do
they need to become (cognitively) literate? The problem comes when these
arbitrary dividing lines, driven by public demands for accountability, define
instructional objectives. Teachers may orient their teaching to the criterion
measure of skills so they can demonstrate achievement of program goals, but
students may remain at the periphery of literacy if they have not understood
the relationship between skills and knowledge.
The second limitation is that these views of literacy tend to exclude con-
textual factors—how people in di√erent communities produce and use texts
in di√erent ways. When educators see literacy primarily as an individual,
‘‘inside-the-head’’ phenomenon, they often disregard significant di√erences
in the purposes, functions, and social value of literacy across cultural con-
texts. Such di√erences can cause cultural dissonance or clashes. For example,
a Chinese ESL student who writes an essay incorporating sentences he has
recalled verbatim from earlier reading may be accused of plagiarism, even
though the scholarly tradition in which he has been trained may not construe
it as such (Pennycook 1996). An American who is learning Arabic in Egypt
and is not attuned to the shifts between standard and colloquial language in
newspapers and political speeches may miss crucial clues to the writer’s point
of view. A Japanese ESL student schooled in the yakudoku tradition of read-
ing as translation may encounter di≈culties when she is asked to give a
critical appraisal of an English text, because that request clashes with the
classroom practices with which she is familiar (Hino 1992). So, instead of
thinking of literacy as a single, generic, or readily transferable ability, we need
to consider the question: In what particular contexts, and for what particular
purposes, can one be considered literate?
The third limitation is that traditional views of literacy are largely incom-
patible with the goals of communicative language teaching, because they
emphasize prescriptive norms rather than appropriateness of use. On one
hand, we want our students to communicate e√ectively with di√erent groups
in a range of social contexts, using a variety of appropriate gambits in dif-
ferent situations. On the other, we teach—and most important, we test—a
narrow standard of literacy that requires adherence to usage prescribed by a
socially dominant norm. Moreover, this narrow standard tends to be in-
 Literacy as a New Organizing Principle 47

creasingly reinforced and insisted on as one progresses through the levels of

academic language study.
What is needed is a reconciliation between the emphasis on face-to-face
verbal interaction and the development of learners’ ability to read, discuss,
think, and write critically about texts. These two sets of goals are not inher-
ently incompatible. The challenge is to develop a conceptual framework that
is broad enough to accommodate both of them. As a step in this direction, I
propose a synthesis of these goals by enveloping the textual within a larger
framework of the communicative—a framework that links, rather than di-
vides, beginning and advanced levels of language learning. The groundwork
for this move has been established over the past several decades, as an in-
creasing number of notable language educators have argued for an emphasis
on literacy in language teaching.

Calls for Foreign Language Literacy

In 1978, Henry Widdowson argued that interpretation underlies all
communicative language abilities. Widdowson’s scheme for developing
learners’ ability to discern the communicative value of texts (not simply their
signification) relied on an integrated approach to reading and writing: ‘‘What
the learner needs to know how to do,’’ he argued, ‘‘is to compose in the act of
writing, comprehend in the act of reading, and to learn techniques of reading
by writing and techniques of writing by reading’’ (1978, p. 144).
Many of Widdowson’s ideas were echoed and extended in two landmark
books published in the 1990s: Reading for Meaning (1991) by Janet Swa√ar,
Katherine Arens, and Heidi Byrnes, and Context and Culture in Language
Teaching (1993) by Claire Kramsch. Both books articulated a vision of foreign
language education that shifted emphasis from sentence grammar, structure
drills, and information retrieval to a more thoughtful mode of learning that
involved students’ reflection on language and content and specifically on the
connections between the details of texts and students’ personal responses to
those texts.
Other foreign language educators have added their voices. Marlies Mueller
(1991) argues that students need to be made aware of how systems of inter-
pretation are historically created and how they vary with time and place. She
recommends the teaching of a ‘‘pluralistic literacy’’ that introduces students
to ‘‘diverse ways of reading that will enable them to recognize the political
and moral implications of diverse ways of understanding’’ (p. 22).
Similarly, Russell Berman (1996) has called for ‘‘foreign cultural literacy’’ as
48 Richard G. Kern

a pedagogical goal that entails ‘‘a student’s familiarity with and facility in the
language, values, and narratives of a culture not his or her own’’ (p. 43).
According to Berman, foreign cultural literacy would highlight the interplay
between language and culture and familiarize students not only with the
literary canon but also with the ‘‘stories another culture tells about itself ’’
(p. 43), as reflected in films, songs, status symbols, political discourse, and
everyday language.
Focusing on the often-di≈cult transition from language study to literary
study at the second-year college level, Richard Jurasek (1996) sees literacy as a
key concept for curricular integration. He has proposed an intermediate-
level language curriculum that incorporates what he calls literacy-related
‘‘inquiry subsets.’’ These involve exploring cultures as perceptual systems and
using texts to heighten students’ awareness of how we construct meaning.
Finally, Heidi Byrnes (1998) has recently developed a remarkable literacy-
based curriculum in the German Department at Georgetown University. She
argues that designing a curriculum around literacy makes it easier to inte-
grate the teaching of language, literary interpretation, and culture.
Although the details of their proposals di√er somewhat, Widdowson,
Swa√ar, Kramsch, Mueller, Berman, Jurasek, and Byrnes all see reading and
writing not as peripheral support skills but as a crucial hub where language,
culture, and thought converge. They argue for systematically guiding learners
in their e√orts to create, interpret, and reflect on discourse in order to better
understand how meanings are made and received, both in their own culture
and in another.

Principles of a Sociocognitive View of Literacy

As a starting point in considering a literacy-based approach to language
teaching, I have proposed a working definition for an expanded notion of lit-
eracy that weaves together linguistic, cognitive, and sociocultural strands.
This definition is not meant to describe all forms of literacy but rather to
characterize literacy in the specific context of academic foreign language
education.
Literacy is the use of socially, historically, and culturally situated practices
of creating and interpreting meaning through texts. It entails at least a tacit
awareness of the relations between textual conventions and their contexts of
use and, ideally, the ability to reflect critically on those relations. Because it is
purpose-sensitive, literacy is dynamic—not static—and variable across and
within discourse communities and cultures. It draws on a wide range of
 Literacy as a New Organizing Principle 49

cognitive abilities, on knowledge of written and spoken language, on knowl-

edge of genres, and on cultural knowledge (Kern 2000, p. 16).
This definition is admittedly fairly abstract. In order to establish more
useful guidelines for teaching practice, we can consider seven principles
that emerge from this definition that can be applied concretely to language
teaching.
1. Literacy involves interpretation. Writers and readers participate in double
acts of interpretation—the writer interprets the world (experiences, events,
ideas, and so on), and the reader in turn interprets the writer’s interpretation
in terms of his or her own conception of the world.
2. Literacy involves collaboration. Writers write for an audience, even if they
write only for themselves. Their decisions about what needs to be said and
what can go without saying are based on their understanding of their au-
dience. Readers, in turn, must contribute their motivation, knowledge, and
experience in order to make the writer’s text meaningful.
3. Literacy involves conventions. How people read and write texts is not
universal, but is governed by cultural conventions that evolve through use
and are modified for individual purposes.
4. Literacy involves cultural knowledge. Reading and writing function within
particular systems of attitudes, beliefs, customs, ideals, and values. Readers
and writers that are operating from outside a given cultural system risk
misunderstanding, or being misunderstood by, people who are operating on
the inside of the cultural system.
5. Literacy involves problem solving. Because words are always embedded in
linguistic and situational contexts, reading and writing involve figuring out
relationships between words, between larger units of meaning, and between
texts and real or imagined worlds.
6. Literacy involves reflection and self-reflection. Readers and writers think
about language and its relations to the world and themselves.
7. Literacy involves language use. Literacy is not just about writing systems,
nor is it just about lexical and grammatical knowledge. It requires knowledge
of how language is used in spoken, as well as written, contexts to create
discourse. (Kern 2000, pp. 16–17)

Although I have framed these principles in terms of reading and writ-

ing, they are not unique to literacy and apply broadly to communica-
tion in general. In fact, the seven principles might be summarized by a
macro-principle: literacy involves communication. This seven-point linkage
50 Richard G. Kern

between literacy and communication has important implications for lan-

guage teaching, since it provides a bridge to span the gap that all too often
separates introductory communicative language teaching and advanced liter-
ary teaching.
The seven principles of literacy as communication provide some guidance
in identifying what and how to teach in order to support a general goal of
reflective communication. Language, conventions, and cultural knowledge
form the basic elements to be taught, and they are taught in conjunction with
the processes of interpretation, collaboration, problem solving, and reflection.
These elements and processes can be taught using a variety of activities that,
as a group, address four di√erent but complementary literacy needs of the
foreign language learner: (1) to be immersed meaningfully in written lan-
guage; (2) to receive direct assistance in the complexities of reading and
writing FL texts; (3) to learn to analyze and evaluate what they read; and
(4) to learn how to transform meanings into new representations. Although
space does not permit me to demonstrate the concrete application of the
seven principles to the teaching of a text, the reader is referred to Kern (2000)
for multiple detailed examples. What is important to clarify, however, is that
there is no dogmatic method associated with literacy-based teaching. Rather,
learners’ needs can be addressed using a wide variety of instructional activ-
ities already familiar to language teachers, such as voluntary reading, readers’
theater, reading journals, free writing, semantic mapping, discussions based
on critical focus questions, textual comparisons, translation, summary writ-
ing, stylistic pastiches, and other kinds of textual reformulations.

Goals of a Literacy-Based Curriculum

How do the goals of literacy-based teaching compare with our previous
goals? Literacy-based teaching assumes the primary importance of develop-
ing communicative ability in a new language, but it also emphasizes within
that general goal the development of learners’ ability to analyze, interpret, and
transform discourse, to think critically about how discourse is constructed
and how it is used toward various social ends. In other words, it emphasizes
both oral and written communication that is informed by a metacommuni-
cative awareness of how discourse is derived from relations between language
use, contexts of interaction, and larger sociocultural contexts.
So, a literacy-based curriculum is neither a purely structural nor a purely
communicative approach; rather, it attempts to relate communicative and
structural dimensions of language use, as illustrated in table 3.1.
Adopting literacy as an organizing principle of language teaching entails
 Literacy as a New Organizing Principle 51

Table 3.1 Goals of Structural, Communicative, and Literacy-Based Curricula

Structural Emphasis Communicative Emphasis Literacy Emphasis

Knowing Doing Doing and reflecting on

doing in terms of knowing
Usage Use Usage-use relations
Language forms Language functions Form-function relations
Achievement (display Functional ability to Communicative
of knowledge) communicate appropriateness informed
by metacommunicative
awareness

Source: Kern 2000, p. 304.

subtle but important changes in teaching and curriculum. Instructional ob-

jectives shift from an emphasis on conversation for conversation’s sake or the
delivery of linguistic and cultural facts toward the development of learners’
ability to interpret and evaluate critically language use in a variety of spoken
and written contexts. Instructional activities (such as those listed above)
emphasize interdependencies among speaking, listening, reading, and writ-
ing skills and focus students’ attention on the interactions between linguistic
form, situational context, and communicative and expressive functions. The
study of language and the study of literature are treated as mutually depen-
dent, not mutually exclusive, activities.
A literacy-based curriculum, by including nonliterary texts, may at first
blush seem to deprivilege literature. This perception is valid to the extent that
the focus of instruction is broadened beyond an exclusive focus on literary
texts. The value of literary study, however, is ultimately enhanced, not dimin-
ished, because textuality becomes a major focus of teaching at all levels.
Explicit links can be made between literary writing and other forms of cul-
tural expression, such as film, art, music, architecture, and news media, thus
improving students’ understanding of how literature fits into the ‘‘big pic-
ture’’ of signifying practices in the foreign society. Time spent on the explora-
tion of cultural narratives in various popular media might displace time
spent on the next literary text on the syllabus, but if such digressions serve to
illuminate students’ understanding of certain cultural underpinnings of that
literary text and create a bridge to what students are learning in their culture
or civilization courses, then it is time well spent. As students begin to under-
stand the connections between di√erent forms of cultural expression, their
interest and motivation to study literature will likely increase significantly.
52 Richard G. Kern

Although it is not possible to explore the features of a literacy-based cur-

riculum in great detail here (again, the reader is referred to Kern 2000), two
key features are noteworthy: (1) the way in which reading, writing, and
discussion are sequenced in the classroom and (2) the new respective roles of
students and teachers.

Sequencing of Instruction
In the traditional foreign language curriculum, reading, talking, and
writing are relatively distinct phases of a linear instructional sequence. Stu-
dents generally prepare for class by reading a text. They talk about the text in
class, and then they are sometimes asked to write an essay about it. Some-
times students write notes or keep a reading journal, in which case the
sequence bypasses discussion. Talking sometimes precedes reading, as in pre-
reading activities. Rarely, however, does writing precede either reading or
talking. The phases are typically discrete and sequential, rather than recur-
sive, as shown in figure 3.1. Most often that which can be done outside of class
(that is, reading and writing) is, in order to reserve class time for talking. This
makes talking the primary collaborative activity and maintains reading and
writing as activities that students do mainly on their own.
The problem with the traditional sequence of instruction is that students
get little direct help with what they typically report to be the most di≈cult
part of language study, namely, reading and writing. It is quite possible, in
fact, that reading and writing are so often perceived as di≈cult precisely
because they are so often done outside of class, by oneself, alone. If they were
more often brought into the mainstream of classroom activity, if they were
made to be collaborative as well as individual activities, they would perhaps
not seem so di≈cult.
For example, reading to identify thematic elements of a text or to identify
its underlying assumptions or ideological bias are not well-practiced habits
for most students. In fact, learners often need to be shown what teachers
mean by these things before they can do what they have been asked to do. In
other words, simply handing students a text to read is often not enough;
teachers need to start o√ by leading students to recognize the kinds of textual
phenomena they hope students will ultimately recognize on their own when
they read. First and foremost, this usually requires engaging learners in dis-
cussion—or writing—before they read. In literacy-based teaching the relation
between reading, writing and talking is not linear but overlapping, as shown
in figure 3.2.
It is the overlap that most clearly di√erentiates a literacy-focused curricu-
 Literacy as a New Organizing Principle 53

Fig. 3.1. Traditional Linear Relationship of Reading, Talking, and Writing

Reading 8 Talking 8 Writing

i ------------------------------ ∞
Source: Kern 2000, p. 131.

lum from traditional curricula. Reading and writing overlap not only in the
sense that students write formal essays about what they’ve read. They also
overlap
§ when students use writing to concretely represent their thoughts and inter-
pretations of texts as they read—in the form of reading journals, sum-
maries, diagrams, and so forth;
§ when students write their own version of a topic or a theme before reading
the target text, in order to be sensitized to the topic or theme before reading
commences;
§ when students write reflections on their own reading processes—their ex-
periences, di≈culties, and insights—as a component of their reports on
their independent reading;
§ when students read to improve their writing—when they attend to linguis-
tic, rhetorical, or stylistic elements in texts in order to incorporate them
into their own writing; and
§ when students actively and critically read their own and their peers’ writing
in the editing process.
Working in these areas of overlap can not only bridge the traditional divi-
sions among the so-called four skills of speaking, listening, reading and
writing but can also help bridge the gap that too often separates the teaching
of language from the teaching of literature.

Roles of Teachers and Learners

Another general feature of a literacy-based curriculum has to do with
the roles that teachers and students play. These roles have been linked for a
long time to the notion of apprenticeship. What has changed is the focus of
the apprenticeship. In the days of grammar translation and later structural
or audiolingual language teaching methods, students were apprentices to
54 Richard G. Kern

Fig. 3.2. The Relation of Reading, Writing, and Talking in a Literacy-Based Curriculum

Source: Kern 2000, p. 132.

philologists or linguists. The communicative competence models of the 1980s

made the native speaker the model, and students often apprenticed with the
ultimate aim of developing ‘‘near-native’’ competence. In literacy-based lan-
guage teaching, students are aiming to become neither apprentice philolo-
gists nor apprentice native speakers but rather apprentice discourse analysts
and intercultural explorers.
One of the biggest challenges is establishing teacher and student roles that
allow for critical analysis of classroom communication itself. The role that
typified structural approaches to language teaching (and one that is still often
expected by students) is that of the traditional authority: the teacher is the
one who is always right, the one who has the knowledge the students need to
acquire, the one who manages and controls everything that happens in the
classroom. This role tends to polarize responsibility for learning. If the stu-
dents do not learn, it is either because the teacher did not teach things right
or because the students are too lazy or not smart enough. The learner role
that complements an authoritative teacher role is one of deference and rela-
tive passivity.
A more contemporary teacher role, born of communicative, ‘‘learner-
centered’’ language teaching, is represented by the well-known motto ‘‘The
teacher is the guide on the side, not the sage on the stage.’’ The idea is that the
teacher designs and organizes learning activities and then gets out of the way,
so that students can go about their business of communicating and learning.
Responsibility for what happens in the class (including student learning) is
therefore shared: the teacher is there to organize, to motivate, to provide
assistance and feedback, but the students must play an active participatory
role that involves a considerable degree of autonomy in the form of self-
motivation, self-direction, and cooperation.
Unfortunately, neither of these sets of roles is likely to promote the kind of
 Literacy as a New Organizing Principle 55

classroom culture that fosters critical thinking and metacommunicative

awareness. What is needed to accomplish these goals is a recasting of teacher
and learner roles inherited from structural and communicative approaches.
This recasting is linked to what I call the three R’s of literacy-based teaching,
namely, Responding, Revising, and Reflecting.

Responding
Responding means both ‘‘giving a reply’’ and ‘‘reacting.’’ Both mean-
ings come into play when we read, write, and talk. When we read, we respond
in the ‘‘reacting’’ sense, based on how well what we are reading meshes with
our knowledge, beliefs, values, attitudes, and so on. We also respond in the
‘‘replying’’ sense when we fill in discourse that the writer has left implicit in
the text. Furthermore, during the process of talking about a text, the various
responses put forth by students and the teacher become ‘‘secondary texts’’ to
which one also responds—and these secondary responses will ultimately
influence one’s response to the primary, written text.
Writing involves responding in both concrete and abstract ways. On the
concrete level, we respond to a letter, to an assignment, or to an exam ques-
tion by writing. On a more abstract level, the processes of inventing, plan-
ning, redesigning, and evaluating what we want to say involve responding to
a complex array of factors, including the task demands, the ultimate purpose
of the writing, and the identity of the addressee. From this abstract perspec-
tive, every text that students write is a response, as is every text they read. A
literacy-based approach to teaching thus encourages students not only to
respond to the texts they read but also to have some sense of how those texts
are themselves responses to something.

Revising
Revising is often associated exclusively with writing. In literacy-based
teaching, though, revision is an important part of a wide range of activities.
At the level of the lesson plan, as well as at the level of curriculum, literacy-
based teaching emphasizes rereading, rewriting, rethinking, reframing, and
redesigning language. The point is not to repeat but to redo within a di√erent
contextual frame, with a di√erent purpose, or for a di√erent audience, in
order to develop students’ ability to reflect on how they design meaning
di√erently in diverse situations.
Rereading is a way to fine-tune interpretations and make connections that
were not at first obvious, but it is also a way to better understand the reading
process itself. When readers can evaluate their responses to reading from
56 Richard G. Kern

various angles, they can experience the ways meaning can shift as contexts of
interpretation change. If readers are bound to a view of reading as remem-
bering as much as possible from a single pass through a text, they not only
limit the richness of their reading experience but also hold themselves back
from fully developing their communicative potential as language users.
Writing, of course, benefits considerably from revision. What is most
significant from a language teaching perspective is not the quality of the final
draft but the e√ects of the revising process itself on the stance that learners
take toward their writing, the kinds of questions they ask themselves, and
their capacity to reshape their expression—and perhaps even their intentions.
The teacher plays an important role in providing specific purposes for
revision. Simply giving students more time to read or write will probably not
be enough. Students need some kind of structure—like comparing one draft
or reading with another, but with a specific purpose in making the comparison.
The purpose might come from class discussion, or it might come from
students’ journals. Most often it will need to be specified by the teacher.
Students’ speaking ability can also be enhanced by revision and redesign-
ing. One student’s telling of a story can be developed into a series of retellings
that allow students to express and experience multiple meanings based on the
same content. When the teacher systematically varies the parameters of con-
text, students can become aware of the relations between language, context,
and meaning.

Reflecting
The third R, reflecting, has to do with evaluation. From the standpoint
of receptive language use (that is, listening, reading, viewing), reflecting
might involve questions like the following: What might be this person’s in-
tentions? What does this particular manner of expression imply about the
speaker’s or the writer’s beliefs and attitudes about the topic, about me
(the reader or listener), and about our relation to one another? Are other
signs (body language, gestures, situational context, text formatting) consis-
tent with what has been said or written? or do they somehow modify the
meaning?
From the standpoint of expressive language use (that is, speaking and
writing), reflecting might involve questions like the following: In what ways
might the other person interpret what I say if I say it like this? What am I
assuming about his or her knowledge or beliefs? Is it appropriate for me to
say this, given who I am in relation to my interlocutor or reader?
Tied up in all of these questions are issues of cultural norms and cultural
 Literacy as a New Organizing Principle 57

Table 3.2 Summary of Teacher-Learner Roles in Structural, Communicative, and

Literacy-Based Curricula

Structural Communicative
Emphasis Emphasis Literacy Emphasis

Role models for philologists or native speakers discourse analysts

teachers and linguists and intercultural
learners explorers

Primary mode of Correcting Responding (to Responding (to

teacher response (enforcing a communicative language as used),
prescriptive norm) intent) focusing attention
on reflection and
revision

Predominant Deference to Active participation: Active engagement:

learner roles authority: focus focus on using focus on using
on absorption and language in face-to- language, reflecting
analysis of face interaction on language use,
material presented and revising

Source: Adapted from Kern 2000, p. 312.

knowledge. In reflecting on culture, teachers need to be concerned not only

with the target culture to which learners are being exposed but also with the
culture or cultures that learners themselves bring to the language classroom
and the relation between the two. The culture that learners (and teachers)
bring to the foreign language classroom is more than just a background
influence. It shapes everything that happens in the classroom, including how
teachers and students interact and how they evaluate one another’s roles and
performance.
When we acknowledge the importance of learners’ agency in the meaning-
making process and the cultural values inherent in language use, our teaching
gains greater currency in an international framework. We not only promote
deeper understanding of the language but also equip learners to uncover the
cultural frames surrounding language use, perhaps long past the point when
their formal language study has ended.
We can summarize the shifts in teacher and learner roles corresponding to
the goals set out earlier, situating the three R’s of responding, revising, and
reflecting in relation to roles emphasized in structural and communicative
approaches, in table 3.2.
58 Richard G. Kern

Conclusion
Reading and writing are the most powerful modes of formal learning.
They are fundamental to intellectual inquiry and creativity in all disciplines. I
have suggested that the language teaching profession consider an approach to
teaching that frames reading and writing as highly interrelated acts of com-
munication that are not only relevant for those with literary aspirations but
essential for all language learners and at all levels of language study.
The approach I am advocating is one that is focused on relationships:
linguistic, cognitive, and social relationships between readers, writers, texts,
and culture; between form and meaning; between reading and writing; and
between spoken and written communication. By organizing foreign language
teaching around literacy, we assert the importance of textual analysis; we also
emphasize the need to widen the scope of inquiry beyond the literary canon
to include a range of written and spoken texts that broadly represents the
particular signifying practices of a society. Moreover, we focus on providing
learners with structured guidance in the thinking that goes into reading,
writing, and speaking appropriately in particular contexts.
This emphasis on thinking in a literacy-based curriculum blurs the tradi-
tional division between language skills and academic content because lan-
guage use itself becomes an object of reflection and thus constitutes a source
of intellectual content. For the reasons I have outlined in this chapter, I
believe that an integrated focus on the linguistic, cognitive, and social dimen-
sions of literacy can help us close the language-literature gap and ultimately
enhance the coherence of language teaching and learning at all levels of study.

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 4

Playing Games with Literacy: The Poetic

Function in the Era of Communicative
Language Teaching
c a r l b ly t h

The literacy events of my college French class, a third-semester course,

are the standard fare of today’s so-called communicatively oriented class-
room: deciphering menus, skimming train schedules, analyzing polling data,
scanning newspaper headlines, and so on. In contrast to my French class-
room’s reality-based texts, the bedtime stories I read to my young daughter
are concerned with imaginary worlds. The Cat in the Hat is one of our all-
time favorites. With nonsensical words, catchy rhymes, and silly characters,
Dr. Seuss keeps us thoroughly entertained.
As if this juxtaposition of literacy contexts had not given me enough food
for thought, two recent experiences left me pondering the nature of literacy
in beginning foreign language classrooms. The first occurred during my
foreign language methods class. I had asked my students to analyze the way
the passé composé, a French compound past tense, was presented in eight
di√erent first-year textbooks. The textbooks, all top sellers in the first-year
market, are printed and distributed by the major publishers: McGraw-Hill,
Heinle & Heinle, and Holt, Rinehart and Winston, among others. I was
surprised to discover that none included the famous poem ‘‘Déjeuner du
Matin’’ by Jacques Prévert, once considered part of the pedagogical canon of
the French language curriculum. The disappearance of Prévert’s poem illus-
trates a continuing trend in the publishing of pedagogical foreign language

60
 Playing Games with Literacy 61

materials: poetry, song, and literary texts have gradually given way to infor-
mational texts and various forms of realia.
The second experience was an unsettling conversation I had with a very
talented and creative teaching assistant, a French women who held a master’s
degree in foreign language education from the Sorbonne. One day during a
doctoral seminar in research methods, I asked the teaching assistant about
the research that she had conducted as part of her master’s program. She told
me that she had experimented with the use of songs in her classrooms and
had come to believe that music held great potential for foreign language
learning. Assuming that she had continued to use songs in her French classes
at the University of Texas, I asked her which ones seemed to work best with
American students. My question seemed to take her by surprise. Choosing
her words carefully, she answered that she had not used any songs since
beginning to teach in the United States. When I asked why she had not
continued the practice, she explained that the use of songs did not conform
to the dominant communicative methodologies in American universities.
Her comments made me wonder if other talented instructors had decided to
forgo pedagogical practices out of fear that they might not conform to our
program’s ‘‘communicative’’ methodology!
As a foreign language educator, teacher trainer, and language program
director, I have often participated in discussions in which the elusive and
polyvalent word ‘‘communicative’’ is used to trump all competing pedagogi-
cal practices. I am frankly worried that many teachers who have embraced
communicative language teaching (however they may define it) hold ques-
tionable beliefs about communication. I contend that the belief systems of
many teachers who define their approach to language teaching as ‘‘commu-
nicative,’’ ‘‘interactional,’’ ‘‘task-based,’’ ‘‘process-oriented,’’ ‘‘procedural,’’ or
‘‘learner centered’’ often reduce communication to what is known as referen-
tial or transactional language. In an insightful article titled ‘‘Language Play,
Language Learning,’’ the applied linguist Guy Cook notes the existence of two
underlying premises of communicative language teaching (CLT):
First premise: Authentic/natural language is best for language learning.
Second premise: Authentic/natural language is primarily practical and pur-
poseful, focused upon meaning rather than form.
(Cook 1997, p. 224)

Cook begins by questioning the meaning of the terms natural and authen-
tic. The two terms are more or less synonymous, and though rarely defined
by their advocates, they appear to refer to language used in so-called ordinary
conversation between adult native speakers. Yet in practice these terms are
62 Carl Blyth

simply modifiers that indicate approval rather than any intrinsic quality.
Cook compares the phrase ‘‘natural language’’ to such vacuous advertising
terms as ‘‘natural sweetness’’ and ‘‘natural goodness.’’ If natural and authentic
define a type of language, then presumably they must have opposites. What
then is inauthentic or unnatural language? Many advocates of CLT disdain
pedagogical texts because they are ‘‘doctored,’’ that is, they contain a pur-
posely simplified grammar. But Cook points out that simplified syntax and
lexis are to be expected in certain natural contexts, for example, when adults
address children or when native speakers address nonnative speakers. ‘‘What
could be more unnatural and unauthentic than teachers trying to force
themselves—against their better instincts—to talk to language learners as they
talk to their compatriots?’’ (Cook 1997, p. 225). Cook’s arguments remind
educators that the classroom has its own authenticity. Coining the term
‘‘authentic artifice,’’ Cook quotes VanLier, who claims that pedagogically
contrived texts are often perceived to be authentic by the learner: ‘‘In a
curious way it seems to me that the traditional language lessons of the gram-
mar translation type which I remember from my school days might lay
greater claim to that sort of authenticity than some of the so-called commu-
nicative classrooms that I have had occasion to observe in recent years. I must
emphasize that the old lessons seem to have been authentic for me, although
they may well have been inauthentic for some of my classmates’’ (VanLier
1996, p. 128). And then there is the rather obvious point that in language
teaching, as in life in general, even if a clear distinction between the natural
and the artificial could be established, there is no necessary correlation be-
tween what is natural and what is desirable. As Cook sums up: ‘‘Many bad
aspects of human behavior are natural ones: and many good ones are un-
natural’’ (p. 226).
In this chapter I argue for the importance of the poetic function for
language acquisition and thus challenge the two underlying premises of CLT
described by Cook. The term ‘‘poetic function’’ was coined by the Russian
linguist and literary theorist Roman Jakobson (1960). Following Jakobson’s
work, I show that the poetic function is not a marginal function confined to
literary genres. Rather, it is present in most forms of communication to
varying degrees. I contend that proponents of CLT often reduce communica-
tion to strictly referential language—the exchange of new information re-
garding the context. I argue that such a reductionist view of communication
has had harmful consequences for our foreign language curricula. I conclude
by calling for the resurrection of the poetic function in beginning and inter-
mediate foreign language classrooms.
 Playing Games with Literacy 63

The Purpose of Communication

Before discussing the poetic function and its uses in the language class-
room, it is imperative to examine how proponents of CLT conceive of the
purposes of communication. In the influential foreign language teaching
methods textbook Making Communicative Language Teaching Happen (Lee
and VanPatten 1995), the authors summarize the purposes of communication
as follows:
In the non-classroom world, people engage in communication for a vari-
ety of reasons. However, the two most common purposes of communication
can be described as psychosocial and informational-cognitive. The psychoso-
cial purpose of language involves using language to bond socially or psycho-
logically with someone or some group or to engage in social behavior in some
way. Thus, asking someone ‘‘How’s it going?’’ might be less a desire to know
the actual details of someone’s life than a means of exchanging pleasantries or
letting someone know that you care. The informational-cognitive use of
language involves communication for the purpose of obtaining information,
generally for some other task. . . .
What of the language classroom? While the instructor may use language
for both psychosocial and informational-cognitive purposes, it is doubtful
that the learner, especially in the beginning and intermediate stages, would
use language for many psychosocial purposes. The classroom context typ-
ically does not promote the kind of interaction that requires language to be
used psychosocially. The classroom, however, does lend itself exceptionally
well to the use of communicative language for informational-cognitive pur-
poses. The classroom is ideally suited to the development and implementa-
tion of activities in which learners exchange information for a common
purpose. (pp. 150–51)

According to Cook (2000), most proponents of CLT share Lee’s and Van-
Patten’s assumption that the overriding purpose of communication is the
exchange of information about the context, that is, information that is either
ostensibly true or false. Cook contends that an educator who holds such a
view of communication will logically be compelled to ‘‘create classroom
language use which is needs-based, meaning-focused, ‘real,’ and culturally
conventional’’ (p. 149).
In contrast to the widespread belief that the purpose of communication is
essentially referential, Roman Jakobson maintained that reference was but
one function of the many purposes of communication. According to Caton
(1987), Jakobson and the Prague School maintained that ‘‘Reference is not the
only, nor even the primary goal of communication’’ (cited in Waugh and
64 Carl Blyth

Monville-Burston 1990, p. 15). According to Jakobson, language was best

conceived of as a system of systems suited to various communicative goals. In
his presidential address at the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of
America in 1956, Jakobson presented for the first time his typology of the
speech event and the corresponding communicative functions. He sche-
matized the speech event as involving six essential factors: the speaker, the
addressee, the context, the message (utterance), the contact, and the code.
Each of these six factors corresponds to a di√erent function of language. In
other words, verbal messages have various meanings or functions that can be
described in terms of their ‘‘set’’ (Einstellung) toward one of these six factors.
Jakobson believed that the various functions were amenable to analysis be-
cause they relied on conventionalized linguistic signs.

The Speech Event and the Corresponding Functions

context (referential)
message (poetic)
speaker (emotive) addressee (conative)
contact (phatic)
code (metalingual)
(Waugh and Monville-Burston 1990, p. 16)

According to this schema, if the message is focused on the context, its

primary function is said to be referential, also variously called cognitive,
denotative, or informational. Although reference may be the leading task
of many—perhaps most—messages, Jakobson repeatedly stressed the im-
portance of the other functions for communication. The emotive function
focuses on the speaker’s emotional state. The purely emotive stratum of
language is best exemplified by interjections, which di√er from the means of
referential language both in their sound pattern and in their syntactic role.
Di√erent interjections signal di√erent emotional states of the speaker: Damn
it! All right! Whoa! Jakobson termed an orientation toward the addressee the
conative function, which finds its purest grammatical expression in the voca-
tive and the imperative. For example, if a teacher became annoyed at a
talkative student, she might say, ‘‘Please be quiet!’’ Such an utterance cannot
be challenged in terms of whether it is true. On the other hand, a referential,
declarative statement about the context such as ‘‘The young man in the back
row is not paying attention to the lesson’’ is open to contradiction.
 Playing Games with Literacy 65

The phatic function of language serves to establish contact between the

speaker and the audience or listener. In other words, speakers routinely
attempt to draw the attention of the interlocutor and confirm his or her
attention (‘‘Eh?’’ ‘‘Right?’’). Conversely, listeners frequently signal that they
are attending to the message (‘‘Uh-huh,’’ ‘‘Mm-hm’’). Phatic communication
is present in all small talk, a form of conversation in which information that
is well known or obvious to both parties is expressed. Jackobson cites an
eloquent example from the satirist Dorothy Parker:

‘‘Well!’’ the young man said.

‘‘Well!’’ she said.
‘‘Well, here we are,’’ he said.
‘‘Here we are,’’ she said, ‘‘Aren’t we?’’
‘‘I should say we were!’’ he said.
‘‘Eeyop! Here we are. Well!’’ she said.
‘‘Well,’’ he said, ‘‘well.’’
(cited in Waugh and Monville-Burston 1990, p. 75)

These ritualized formulas are meant to initiate and sustain the communica-
tion, to maintain contact, nothing more. (Of course, in the case of Parker’s
piece, one doubts whether the conversation will ever progress beyond the
phatic!)
Well known to language teachers, the metalingual function is the use of
language to refer to language. Whenever someone asks the meaning of a word
or utterance, the metalingual function predominates. The interdiction of
explicit grammar explanation, common to most ‘‘natural’’ approaches, aims
to avoid the metalingual function, which is found to be suspect by some
language learning theorists (‘‘Teachers should not waste time talking about
the language: they should speak the language.’’) But, in fact, Jakobson con-
tended that first as well as second language learning is characterized by the
metalingual function, or what is now commonly referred to in the jargon of
the day as ‘‘the negotiation of meaning.’’ After all, nothing could be more
natural than for a language learner to ask questions about the grammar and
vocabulary when he or she struggles to comprehend an utterance or text.
The poetic function of language occurs whenever there is a focus on the
formal elements of a message—the phonological, morphological, syntactic,
semantic, and discursive forms. Literary scholars commonly discuss the po-
etic function in terms of figures of speech and rhetorical devices; more
specifically, they analyze alliteration, repetition, rhyme, meter, punning, met-
aphor, imagery, and so on. As an example of the poetic function, Jakobson
cites the political slogan ‘‘I like Ike,’’ three monosyllables that repeat the same
66 Carl Blyth

diphthong ay set o√ by the consonants l and k. Equivalent slogans such as ‘‘I

like Reagan,’’ ‘‘I like Bush,’’ or ‘‘I like Clinton’’ all fall flat, because, in part, of
the lack of the poetic function.
According to Jakobson, the poetic function was not only to be found in
poetry but in all forms of communication. Inspired by the work of Jakobson,
Deborah Tannen has demonstrated that quintessentially literary devices are
prevalent in everyday talk (Tannen 1987, 1989). Her main point is that al-
though ‘‘ordinary’’ conversation may be predominantly referential in func-
tion, the poetic function is always present, as evidenced by patterns of repeti-
tion and parallelism.

Language Learning
So what does the poetic function have to do with language learning and
second language literacy? Nearly all language acquisition specialists have re-
marked on the intensely poetic nature of child language (Kuczaj 1983; Owens
1996). One of the most commonplace observations in the psycholinguistic
literature is that young children repeat utterances addressed to them without
any recognition of the referential value of the words (Kuczaj 1983). They seem
to be captured by formal properties of the language, under the spell of the
sounds, as it were. Children produce utterances well before they understand
the referential function of the spoken word. These nonreferential utterances
seem to privilege the phatic function (establishing and prolonging contact
with the caregiver) and the poetic function (creation of language for aesthetic
reasons). Child language does not have to have a purpose in the sense of
completing a task. It is not necessarily a means to an end. Rather, it seems that
for children language production is a pleasurable end in itself.
Guy Cook makes the connections between language play, language learn-
ing, and a focus on linguistic form even more explicit. In a direct challenge to
CLT’s second premise, he claims:
‘‘Far from being fixated on meaningful language to e√ect social action (as
Krashen and others would have had us believe), young children acquiring
their first language spend a great deal of their time producing or receiving
playful language. They have, after all, only limited reasons to use language for
practical purposes in a world in which their every move—what they wear,
what they eat, where they go—is decided by somebody else . . . Thus, for
young children a good deal of language remains primarily driven by sound
rather than meaning, chosen to produce chance patterns which are pretty to
the ear, but whose meaning may be absurd or unclear, as in this children’s
rhyme:
 Playing Games with Literacy 67

Diddle diddle dumpling my son John

Went to bed with his trousers on
One shoe o√ and the other shoe on
Diddle diddle dumpling my son John.’’ (Cook 1997, p. 228)

When language hangs in what Cook calls ‘‘a friendly frame of sound,’’ that is,
rhymed rhythmic verse or the continuing sound of the adult voice reading to
them, children are not troubled by words or expressions with no discernible
referential meaning (‘‘Diddle diddle dumpling . . .’’). In subsequent conversa-
tion, children often by chance reveal amusing mis-hearings. For example, the
words of the Lord’s Prayer (‘‘Lead us not into temptation’’) are misunder-
stood as ‘‘Lead us not into Penn Station’’ or the verse ‘‘Hallowed be thy name’’
is heard as ‘‘Howard be thy name’’ (Cook 1997, p. 229). Cook goes on to note
that in contrast to this cavalier attitude toward meaning, child language is
carefully focused on linguistic form. Many children’s rhymes and stories
emphasize grammatical patterns and appear to have much in common with
so-called mechanical drills:
This little piggy went to market,
This little piggy stayed home,
This little piggy had roast beef,
This little piggy had none,
and this little piggy cried
‘‘Wee, wee, wee,’’ all the way home!

The undisputed centrality of the poetic function for child language does
not necessarily mean that it has much import for adult second language
learning. Adults, however, are fonder of language play than is generally ac-
knowledged. Most scholars who have studied verbal art claim that the poetic
function is found in both child and adult language—it never goes away
(Friedrich 1986). The di√erence, then, is not the presence or absence of the
poetic function but the degree to which it is present, as well as the relevant
forms or genres of speech play (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1976).
One of the most prominent instances of language play is literature. Read-
ing can be downright pleasurable no matter whether one prefers the classics
or pulp fiction. In fact, fiction allows adults relief from the real world. Cook
argues that ‘‘in literature, more than any other discourse, we see the fallacy
of positing attention to form and to meaning as alternatives’’ (Cook 1997,
p. 230). But language play and the poetic function are not only features of
literary discourse. They are also quite evident in advertisements, jokes, news-
paper headlines, gra≈ti—forms of discourse that are rife with puns, parallel-
isms, grammatical substitutions, and so on. In fact, as Tannen argues, even
68 Carl Blyth

ordinary conversation is not as task-based and referential as proponents of

CLT seem to believe. Conversational discourse is as much about the psycho-
social as it is about the informational-cognitive.

Implications for Language Teaching

What implications might all this have for language teaching? I argue
that the poetic function has been marginalized in foreign language meth-
odology and should be restored by reinstating many discarded and reviled
activities: explicit attention to form, manipulation of form, repetition, even
rote learning. I am not proposing a return to the good old days of grammar
translation and a belletristic curriculum. Nevertheless, I do see a role for
many out-of-fashion activities.

Explicit Attention to Form

Language instruction has long been plagued by a continuing debate
concerning the proper role of grammar instruction. Unfortunately, the de-
bate has fostered a dichotomous approach to grammar instruction and a
naive view of the nature of grammar. In the so-called traditional approach
grammatical phenomena are assumed to be wholly amenable to explicit
presentation and practice. In the other approach, teachers maintain that such
linguistic analysis is largely irrelevant to acquisition. What is all-important is
comprehensible input. Although these two approaches are opposites in many
ways, they actually are both based on a conception of grammar that is mono-
lithic: either grammar can be taught, or it cannot. Both conceptions of
grammar are equally untenable (Blyth 1997).
The recent Focus-on-Form movement, the middle ground between these
two extremes, is based on a more realistic conception of grammar as hetero-
geneous, that is, comprised of qualitatively di√erent phenomena. Some
grammatical points are axiomatic—easy to describe, easy to apply. Other
items are essentially probabilistic statements about language use—di≈cult, if
not impossible, to apply. Teachers intuitively understand that not all gram-
matical points are created equal, and yet there is still a widespread one-size-
fits-all mentality (Doughty and Williams 1998).
Another fallacy fostered by the ‘‘great grammar debate’’ is the belief that
grammar instruction is synonymous with explicit techniques. The real prob-
lem is that grammar instruction in both approaches is limited to a small set
of pedagogical practices. In contrast, Focus-on-Form pedagogy profitably
mixes explicit and implicit techniques depending on the grammatical item
and the communicative task. In my mind, the greatest contribution of the
 Playing Games with Literacy 69

Focus-on-Form movement has been to demonstrate that there are many

ways to focus on linguistic forms in the classroom. In other words, a form-
focused activity need not be metalinguistic, as is typically the case; instead it
may be poetic (in the Jakobsonian sense). The term input enhancement,
Focus-on-Form jargon for the embedding of a given form in a text so that the
reader pays more attention to the form, is nothing new. Skilled writers have
been ‘‘enhancing the input’’ for millennia.
As a language program director looking for more creative ways to focus on
linguistic form, I slowly reached the di≈cult conclusion that I would have to
produce my own materials. My goal was to create a curriculum that mixed
referential texts with texts that emphasized verbal artistry. As part of their
apprenticeship in our program, teaching assistants are responsible for find-
ing French texts that focus on the poetic function—songs, poetry, jokes,
nursery rhymes. We are currently experimenting with various ways to use
these poetic texts in class, sometimes as out-of-class readings, sometimes as
choral readings in class, sometimes as the basis for game-like drills, some-
times as texts for listening comprehension.

Repetition, Rote Learning, Manipulation of Forms

In her article on repetition in conversational discourse, Tannen notes
that negative attitudes toward repetition in language abound. For example,
Tannen points out that the adjective repetitious in common usage is almost
always pejorative. She cites W. H. Auden, who observed that repetition is
associated in most people’s minds with all that is most boring and lifeless,
such as punching time clocks. Auden lamented that the denigration of repeti-
tion presents an obstacle for poetry, since this literary art form is based on the
repetition of words and sounds in order to create aesthetic rhythms. Tannen
blames the bad press of repetition on the conduit metaphor, according to
which language is viewed as a neutral vehicle for conveying mostly referential
information (Tannen 1987, p. 585).
Repetition in language teaching is usually associated with the greatly ma-
ligned mechanical drill. The technique of pattern practice rests on the as-
sumption that short training sessions with a small number of exemplars, each
of which is typically practiced once, will lead to fluency. Although most
teachers no longer subscribe to such behavioristic notions of language learn-
ing, that does not mean that drills and repetition in general do not have a
place in language classrooms. Furthermore, the jury is still out concerning the
role of formulaic language in language learning. The anthropological linguist
A. L. Becker has argued that grammar may be more a matter of the accumula-
tion of prior texts that are remembered than the learning of abstract rules
70 Carl Blyth

used in the generation of original utterances (Becker 1984). The linguist

Dwight Bolinger argued for a similar account of linguistic competence:
At present we have no way of telling the extent to which a sentence like I went
home is a result of invention, and the extent to which it is a result of repetition,
countless speakers before us having already said it and transmitted it to us in
toto. Is grammar something where speakers produce constructions, or where
they reach for them, from a preestablished inventory? (Bolinger 1961, p. 381)

Although the actual role of repetition in adult second language learning

may still be unclear, there does seem to be a connection between what is spon-
taneously repeated by learners and linguistic or discursive form. Several years
ago, my colleagues and I developed a CD-ROM to accompany the textbook we
were using at the time (Blyth et al. 1995). The CD-ROM was developed with a
research agenda in mind, and so we conducted several experiments concern-
ing how students used multimedia for their own language learning. The CD-
ROM consisted of approximately 170 screens, each with a text field, an image
field, a notes field, and a set of comprehension questions. Vocabulary and
grammatical points were annotated with hot links embedded in the texts.
Thus, clicking on an underlined word would give the user various kinds of
additional information—a translation, an image, and a brief grammatical or
cultural explanation, if necessary. Students could also look up words in an on-
line dictionary and record themselves in order to compare their accent to that
of native speakers. The texts di√ered widely in both length and genre from
very short informal dialogues to expository texts three to four paragraphs in
length. A tracking device was programmed into the CD-ROM so that we could
see exactly how students used the software. One conclusion that we gleaned
from the tracking data was that students rarely recorded themselves. Of the 170
texts, only a handful seemed consistently to prompt students to record them-
selves. When I looked at the anomalous texts, I discovered that they were all
highly structured and repetitive. For example, one text was titled ‘‘Quel temps
fait-il aujourd’hui?’’ (What’s the weather like today?). This text consisted
entirely of weather expressions, which all belong to a grammatical frame:

Il fait beau. Il fait du soleil. Il fait du vent.

It is nice. It is sunny. It is windy.

Why did students spontaneously choose to repeat highly repetitive texts,

instead of other, more conversational texts? Perhaps they were used to doing
similar drill-like work in previous classrooms, and thus their behavior could
have been an artifact of their experience with traditional language labs (Blyth
1999). Or it may be that students chose these texts because they were easy to
 Playing Games with Literacy 71

imitate. In other words, the poetic structure of the texts made them similar to
a pattern drill that lends itself to repetition since it requires only one new
piece of information per sentence. Students quickly mastered the impersonal
verb frame (Il fait . . .), thus allowing a level of automaticity not available with
other texts. Rather than reject repetition as a throwback to outdated psycho-
logical theories, I think that we need to do much work in order to understand
how repetition and imitation a√ect adult language learning and why.

Grammatical Exemplification
I have also recently endeavored to emphasize the poetic function in the
production of an on-line pedagogical grammar for students of French at the
University of Texas at Austin. The grammar Web site, called Tex’s French
Grammar, is designed to function as a reference grammar to be used in
several di√erent courses. Because reference grammars are typically not inte-
grated with thematic vocabulary, these works are characterized by unrelated
example sentences with little if any context. Since the lack of context frees
language from its normal referential function, we decided to make that free-
dom into an advantage by emphasizing the poetic function. We followed the
lead of the playwright Eugene Ionesco, who drew inspiration for his absurdist
plays from the bizarre language found in pedagogical materials. A good
example of the poetic function can be found in the dialogue exemplifying the
word tout (all, every), which may function as an adjective, adverb, or pro-
noun in French. The main character, a Francophone armadillo named Tex,
recites a love poem to impress his girlfriend.
Malgré toutes les filles In spite of all the girls
que j’ai connues, that I have known,
je pense à toi . . . I think of you . . .
tout le temps, all the time,
toute la journée, all day long,
tous les soirs, every evening,
toutes les nuits. every night.

After reciting his poem, Tex is so pleased with himself that he exclaims:
Tout tatou est poète! Every armadillo is a poet!

The poetic function is manifest in the repetition of the construction of the

adjective tout followed by the definite article and the noun. It is also manifest
in the repeated syllables of ‘‘Tout tatou est poète.’’ The goal of these example
sentences is to catch the fancy of our students, who seem to enjoy the whimsi-
cal nature of this reference grammar.
72 Carl Blyth

Recognition That the Language Classroom Is Not

a Real World
And finally, reemphasizing the poetic function in our curriculum has
helped us merge language practice with language play. Play can be loosely
defined as behavior not primarily motivated by human need to manipulate
the environment but rather to form and maintain social relationships. In
contrast to Lee and VanPatten (1995), I find the language classroom ideally
suited to the psychosocial uses of language and rather ill-suited at times to so-
called real-world language tasks. After all, one of the hallmarks of play is that
there are no consequences in the real world. Children can pretend to fight
their mortal enemies on the battlefield, but once the game is over, wounds
heal and the dead come back to life. Role-playing, for example, may be
communicative in some respects but it is still essentially play. When the bell
rings, students discard their roles and go on their way. In essence, the lan-
guage classroom is a safe haven where language can be practiced without the
fear of the negative consequences of linguistic errors in the real world.

Conclusion
In guise of conclusion, I summarize my major points as follows:
1. Many teachers who favor CLT hold questionable beliefs about the nature
of communication. In general, proponents of CLT overemphasize the refer-
ential function and overlook the importance of the other functions, in par-
ticular the poetic.
2. Focusing on language form is neither as unnatural nor as inauthentic
as many methodologists have recently argued. When linguistic forms are
focused on in discourse, either the metalingual function or the poetic func-
tion is foregrounded.
3. The language classroom is well suited to language play. Purposeful lan-
guage use should be profitably balanced with language play, the goal of which
is to enjoy the aesthetic pleasure of linguistic creation.
4. Increasing the emphasis on the poetic function in the foreign language
curriculum entails not only changes in method but also changes in content,
that is, the reintroduction of literature and of songs so lacking in today’s
commercial textbooks.

I began this essay by juxtaposing two vastly di√erent contexts of literacy: my

French language classroom and my daughter’s bedtime stories, including the
masterpieces of children’s literature by Dr. Seuss. In 1966 the columnist Ellen
 Playing Games with Literacy 73

Goodman wrote a review of this literary gem that is reprinted on the book’s
jacket: ‘‘Dr. Seuss took 220 words, rhymed them, and turned out The Cat in
the Hat, a little volume of absurdity that worked like a karate chop on the
weary little world of Dick, Jane, and Spot.’’ It is my contention that the
occasionally weary world of realia-based foreign language literacy would
benefit from a similar karate chop of poetic language.

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 5

Reading Between the Cultural Lines

gilberte furstenberg

Reading between the lines of any text is not a simple task. It requires an
intimate knowledge of the writer’s point of view, of his or her intent, and of
the overall context, as well as a deep understanding of the subtleties of lan-
guage. The meaning of a text or a sentence can therefore be constructed
di√erently by di√erent readers, depending on their level of awareness in any
of these areas: one reader may interpret a text literally, whereas another may
be able to see through its outward layers and gain access to its underlying
meanings. Reading between the cultural lines—that is, seeing through the
prism of another culture—is, of course, twice as di≈cult.
It is common for someone reading a text or listening to a story in a foreign
language to construct culturally erroneous images, even if he or she under-
stands the foreign language very well. A striking illustration of that phenom-
enon is to be found in Andreï Makine’s book Le Testament français (Dreams
of Russian Summers), which recounts the relationship between a little boy
growing up in a town on the Russian steppes in the 1960s and his French-
born grandmother, who, on her flower-covered balcony, often tells him sto-
ries from another time, another place: the Paris of her youth. Makine relates
how he pictured in his mind what Neuilly, his French grandmother’s birth-
place, looked like as she recounted tales of her youth to him. He writes:

74
 Reading Between the Cultural Lines 75

Our grandmother had said to us one day, when speaking of her birthplace,
‘‘Oh! At that time Neuilly was just a village . . .’’ She had said it in French, but
we only knew Russian villages. And a village in Russia is inevitably a ring of
izbas; indeed the very word in Russian, derevnya, comes from derevo—a tree,
wood. The confusion persisted, despite the clarifications that Charlotte’s
stories would later bring. At the name, ‘‘Neuilly,’’ we had immediate visions
of the village, with its wooden houses, its herd and its cockerel. And when,
the following summer, Charlotte spoke to us for the first time about a certain
Marcel Proust—‘‘by the way, we used to see him playing tennis at Neuilly, on the
Boulevard Bineau’’—we pictured the dandy with big languorous eyes (she
had shown us his photo) there among the izbas!
Beneath the patina of our French words Russian reality often showed
through. The president of the Republic was bound to have something Sta-
linesque about him in the portrait sketched by our imagination. Neuilly was
peopled with kolkhozniks. (Makine 1997, pp. 23–24)

Reading between the cultural lines is indeed di≈cult, because it requires a

double kind of translation: first a literal translation of the text and then the
ability to transpose oneself and one’s imagination into the author’s or speak-
er’s foreign world. It is a di≈cult skill to acquire, yet an essential one, for the
purpose of developing true literacy in a foreign language. It requires accessing,
seeing, reaching the imbedded layers of emotions, judgments, and implicit
connotations lurking behind a foreign reality and a foreign text, whether a
literary piece, a news article, a story, or even an administrative document.
The question, of course, is this: How can we help our students achieve this
level of understanding? I shall not pretend that I have all the answers or that
I have found the only and definitive way. What I want to do is present one
way in which that kind of reading—reading through the cultural lines—can
be made easier and more achievable than ever before through an innovative
use of technology, in this case of the Web and its network-based communica-
tion tools.
What I shall briefly describe is a Web-based project that my colleagues
Shoggy Waryn (formerly of MIT and now at Brown University) and Sabine
Levet (formerly of MIT and now at Brandeis University) and I developed at
MIT over a period of four years: a project designed to develop students’ in-
depth understanding of another culture. Cultura, as it is called, is a large-scale
project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the
Consortium for Language Teaching and Learning. I shall not describe Cul-
tura in great detail; a more specific account of the project is to be found at the
project Web site »http://llt.msu.edu/vol5num1/furstenberg/default.html…. It
76 Gilberte Furstenberg

is not my purpose here, especially considering that the primary goal of

Cultura is not to develop reading comprehension per se but rather to develop
cross-cultural understanding. Reading, and in particular cross-cultural read-
ing, however, are part and parcel of the project. Not only does the written
word form its central component, but there are also many parallels to be
drawn between the reading of a culture and the reading of a text. It is on this
particular junction that I wish to focus this chapter.
Understanding another culture is, as we know, a di≈cult and life-long
process—especially when we talk about understanding foreign attitudes,
values, beliefs, and ways of interacting with and looking at the world. These
notions are also very di≈cult to teach, because they are essentially elusive,
abstract, invisible. The question then becomes: How does one make some-
thing that is essentially invisible visible, something that is essentially inacces-
sible accessible?
An approach that has worked well is one that is built on a comparative
approach based on the process of juxtaposition. What Cultura o√ers is a
comparative, cross-cultural approach whereby American students taking an
intermediate French class at MIT and French students taking an English class
at the Institut National des Télécommunications in Evry, France, working
together for the duration of a whole semester analyze together a variety of
similar materials that originate from both countries and are presented in
juxtaposition on the Web. These materials are organized according to mod-
ules that range from questionnaires to opinion polls, films, news media, and
texts. Then students exchange in writing, through open on-line forums, their
viewpoints and perspectives on the subjects at hand. Through these cross-
cultural exchanges (written in their own native language) students share
observations, send queries, and answer their counterparts’ questions, with
the goal of better understanding the other’s viewpoints and deepening their
understanding of foreign perspectives.
To support the claim that such cross-cultural encounters can indeed be
powerful allies in the understanding of a foreign culture (and—within it—of
a foreign text), I would like to cite the Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin, who
wrote, ‘‘A meaning only reveals its depths once it has encountered and come
into contact with another foreign meaning’’ (Bakhtin 1986, p. 7). For the
purpose of this essay, I shall focus on what I consider to be the central word
here—meaning—because unearthing the meaning of a foreign word, a for-
eign text, or a foreign point of view is indeed the central element that will
allow a student to ‘‘read’’ fully and truly between the cultural lines.
Such a goal cannot be realized in any single moment. It is the result of a
 Reading Between the Cultural Lines 77

process. And this is what Cultura is all about: taking students along a process
that will help them gradually build the skills that will better enable them to
read, literally and figuratively, a foreign culture. This reading is done in a
series of stages, which I shall now illustrate, in which the reading of a text, the
unearthing of hidden connotations and meanings, play a major part.
In the first stage, students on both sides of the Atlantic answer, in their
native language, a series of three questionnaires (the English and French
questionnaires are mirror images of each other). They include the following:
§ a word-association questionnaire that asks students to say what words they
associate with such words as success or réussite; freedom or liberté; authority
or autorité; individualism or individualisme; suburb or banlieue, and so on;
§ a sentence-completion questionnaire, in which students finish such sen-
tences as ‘‘a good neighbor is someone who . . .’’ or ‘‘un bon voisin est
quelqu’un qui . . .’’; ‘‘a good citizen’’ or ‘‘un bon citoyen’’; and ‘‘a good
parent’’ or ‘‘un bon parent’’; and
§ a situation-reaction questionnaire, in which students spontaneously react
to such situations as the following: ‘‘you see a mother in a supermarket slap
her child’’ or ‘‘vous voyez une mère dans un supermarché qui gifle son
enfant.’’
Note that students answer these questionnaires in their own ‘‘native’’ lan-
guage or, rather, in the language of the country in which they are studying
(not all MIT students taking the French class are American). The fact that
students write in their own language has three advantages:
1. There is no linguistic dominance, so students in the United States and in
France are on an equal footing. This linguistic parity goes a long way in
creating a sense of community.
2. Students are able to express and develop their thoughts fully in their native
language.
3. The language and discourse that students experience are totally authentic.
After students have responded, the answers are posted on the Web in a
juxtaposed fashion, as shown in table 5.1 (from the fall semester of 2000),
with the words suburb and banlieu. (For the sake of authenticity, we de-
cided not to eliminate spelling or typographical errors, unless they rendered
the words or sentence incomprehensible. We did not add missing accents,
either.)
The juxtaposition of these two words (each of which is the only possible
translation of the other) clearly highlights how impossible it is to interchange
78 Gilberte Furstenberg

Table 5.1 American and French Students’ Response to the Topic ‘‘Suburb’’
or ‘‘Banlieu’’

Suburb Banlieu

§ automobiles, dogs, picket fences § adaptation

§ boring, grid, cars § alentours, quartiers
§ boring, hills § chic, insécurité, misère
§ calm, quiet, peaceful § Clichés, Préjugés
§ cozy § defavorisés, aide
§ grass, dogs § delinquence, innovation
§ green, farm, peaceful § Dependance
§ Home, family § déclin, insécurité ghettos, problème
§ home, family de société
§ houses, cars, commuting § défavorisée, pauvre
§ houses, families, quiet § entassement, sans vie, béton
§ houses, flats, quiet § Hétéroclite Paisible Peu sécurisante
§ houses, lawns, middle class § intégration, violence
§ houses, trees, fields § maison, exageration
§ jersey, town § misère, violence
§ Middle Class, Complicated, § non-droit, violence, avenir
Lonely § porfois agréable
§ my town, NYC, awesome § pauvre, pavillon, ennui
§ new york city, middle class § pauvreté, délinquance
§ nice, home, quiet § problèmes, délinquance
§ quiet silence dull § problèmes, cités, délinquance
§ quiet, nice, boring, malls § problèmes, embouteillages, cité
§ quiet, peaceful, outskirts § RER, rap
§ silence, boredom § tag, pit bull, drogue, raket,
§ sparse, trees immigrés
§ suburbia § toujours à découvrir
§ trees, mini-vans § transports, urbanisme
§ wealth, growth § trouble, fruit des erreurs du passé
(60s)
§ white, rich, safe § violence, guettos, drogues
§ white, wealthy, sheltered § violence, oubliées, emmigrés

their realities. In the same way as Neuilly is no Russian village, Pantin, a

banlieue of Paris, is no Lexington, Massachusetts. Immediately, a small win-
dow opens on the opposite socioeconomic realities of a French banlieue and
an American suburb. Even though France now has banlieues résidentielles,
which are more akin to the American model, the typical French banlieue,
 Reading Between the Cultural Lines 79

with its criminalité, ghettos, délinquance, violence, and danger, is much more
akin to the American inner city.
The same process of juxtaposition allows striking di√erences in concepts
to emerge clearly as well, as is evident in the responses to the words individu-
alism and individualisme from the fall 2000 experiment, shown in table 5.2.
The sheer juxtaposition of these words brings to light the deeper meanings

Table 5.2 American and French Students’ Response to the Topic ‘‘Individualism’’

Individualism Individualisme

§ cities, US, style § arrivisme

§ creativity self-containment alienation § capacité, challenge, exclusion
§ creativity, uniqueness § danger
§ essential, growth, potential § danger, orgeuil
§ Europe, Self-Knowing § di≈cile, irrealiste
§ express, freedom, distinquished § echec, c’est fini
§ express, unique, di√erent § egoisme, personnel, protection
§ expression, unique § Egoïsme, Etats-unis
§ free speech, pot § exacerbé, liberté, démocratie
§ free speech, eccentricity moderne
§ free, be your own person § Force de caractèce, Isolationisme
§ freedom, narrowminded, capitalism § égocentrisme, égoïsme
§ freedom, one person § égoisme, haine
§ freedom, power § égoïsme, lutte, asocial
§ frontier, civil liberties § égoïsme, solitaire
§ important, free § indépendance
§ Independance, selfishness, courage § inutile
§ independent, unique § isolement
§ liberty, free-thinking, confidence § moi, ma philosophie indispensable
§ personality, awareness § néfaste, collectif
§ point of view, Kafka, Existentialism § négatif, égoisme
§ positive, cool, ethical § néfaste, groupe
§ security, unique § personnalité, égoisme, carisme
§ self-su≈ciency, careerism, self- § positif, modernité, valorisant
development § repli sur soi, absence d’échange
§ strength, creativity, loneliness § Solitude, Archarnement
uncommon § solitude, laissé pour compte, égoisme
§ unique, di√erent, important § vie, propriété caractère
§ uniqueness, individual § égoïsme, solitude
§ USA, selfishness
80 Gilberte Furstenberg

this word and this concept have for an American and a French person.
Whereas highly positive connotations such as freedom, creativity, and per-
sonal expression constantly appear on the American side, the French side is
replete with such negative notions as égoïsme, égocentrisme, and solitude.
This side-by-side presentation of the two words helps students imme-
diately access the underlying value of the word and realize that what may be
viewed as a very positive notion and presented in a very positive light in one
culture may not be viewed or understood as such by the reader or interlocu-
tor of another culture.
Not all words or sentences or situations yield such obviously di√ering
views. Most require a much closer reading but will reveal, on closer examina-
tion, interesting observations. Let us look, for instance, at the fall 2000 re-
sponses to A well-behaved child and Un enfant bien élevé (table 5.3). Readers

Table 5.3 American and French Students’ Responses Concerning Children

A Well-Behaved Child Un Enfant Bien Élevé

§ listens to their parents § d’autonome

§ polite, attentive § d’heureux
§ polite, deferential, respectful § d’honnête, qui ne doit pas mentir sauf
§ that listens to their parents pour une bonne cause
§ who acts well in public § de sage
§ who behaves in public and doesn’t § est poli, qui sait bien se tenir
make a scene § qui est équilibré psychiquement et
§ who can be respectful in a public physiquement
place § obéit, qui sais se comporter
§ who can control his temper § qui a reçu une bonne éducation
§ who knows what authority is, who a § qui aide au tâches ménagères, se tiend
stranger can take care of and still feel bien à table, est serviable et poli
in charge § qui dit merci et s’il vous plait et qui se
§ who does not cry in public tient bien à table
§ who does not need a spanking in the § qui dit bonjour à la dame
supermarket § qui dit bonjour sans qu’on lui
§ who doesn’t cry or throw tantrums demande de le faire
but explains what they want § qui est intéressé et attentif
§ who doesn’t interrupt people who are § qui est poli, gentil
talking § qui est respectueux envers les
§ who is himself/herself . . . but listens personnes plus âgées que lui
to others § qui ferme sa bouche quand il mange
§ who is not rude § qui n’est pas égoiste
§ who is quiet and polite § qui n’impose pas sa volonté aux autres
§ who is respectful, caring, and sincere
 Reading Between the Cultural Lines 81

Table 5.3 Continued

A Well-Behaved Child Un Enfant Bien Élevé

§ who knows his place § qui pense par lui meme

§ who knows what is permitted and § qui repecte ses camarades et les
what not; that child won’t insist on adultes qu’il rencontre
his parents buying him a new toy § qui respecte ceux qui l’entourent
once they have told him ‘no’ § qui respecte les autres et écoute les
§ who knows when it is OK to act up adultes
and when not § qui respecte les autres, est poli
§ who learns that something is right or § qui respecte son entourage, se
wrong when taught respecte lui-meme, écoute les plus
§ who listens to his parents vieux
§ who listens to his parents § qui respecte tout le monde, comme
§ who listens to his parents les inconnus
§ who listens to its mother § qui sait se montrer discret quand sa
§ who listens to their parents and other présence est malvenue
authority figures § qui sait se tenir chez les autres
§ who obeys his parents, who does not § qui se tient bien à table, qui a appris à
yell avoir un sens critique aiguisé, qui est
§ who respects others bien dans sa peau
§ who respects others. § qui saura sadapter partout et qui sera
§ with good parents apprécié des autres parents.
§ qui est capable d’agir de maniére
autonome en sinserant dans la
sociiété à une place qu’il aura
librement choisie.
§ qui respecte tout le monde, ses
parents comme les inconnus
§ qui sait se montrer discret quand sa
présence est malvenue
§ qui sait se tenir chez les autres
§ qui se tient bien à table, qui a appris à
avoir un sens critique aiguisé, qui est
bien dans sa peau
§ qui saura s’adapter partout et qui sera
apprécié des autres parents.
§ qui est capable d’agir de maniére
autonome en s’inserant dans la
société à une place qu’il aura
librement choisie.
82 Gilberte Furstenberg

who know French will probably remark that these sentences are not an equal
translation of each other. Indeed, the literal translation of un enfant bien élevé
would be ‘‘a well-brought-up child’’; une personne impolie would be translated
by ‘‘an impolite person.’’ We (the French and American instructors at MIT and
INT) have deliberately chosen expressions that are commonly used in both
languages. An initial examination of the responses about a well-behaved child
and un enfant bien élevé reveals, among other things, one very interesting
di√erence: the emphasis, on the American side, on the relationship between
the child and his or her parents and, on the French side, on the relationship
between a child and les autres (other people), the latter being everyone else but
the parents. As can be seen from the responses above, the only times the word
parent is mentioned on the French side are in the following two examples:
qui respecte tout le monde, ses parents comme des inconnus (who respects
everyone, his or her parents as well as strangers) [Here the parents are just
one group among others]

qui saura s’adapter partout et qui sera apprécié des autres [my emphasis]
parents (who knows how to adjust everywhere and who are appreciated by
other parents)

In other words, a well-behaved child, à la française, is a child who has learned

his or her lessons well at home and can apply them outside the home, with
people other than his or her parents.
A subsequent close look at what constitutes a rude person or une personne
impolie reveals that politeness on the French side is clearly of a social nature. A
personne impolie is someone who ‘‘a oublié son savoir-vivre chez soi’’ (forgot
his or her manners at home), ‘‘qui ne dit pas ‘merci, s’il vous plaît,’ ’’ ‘‘qui ne
respecte pas les bonnes manières’’ (who does not say ‘‘thank you,’’ ‘‘please,’’ who
does not use good manners). On the American side, by contrast, politeness
has a much more a√ective slant. Indeed, a rude person in the American style is
someone who is not considerate of other people, does not care about other
people’s feelings, does not respect the feelings of others, or is insensitive to
other people’s feelings. Whereas the word respect appears frequently on both
sides, it is also clear that what the French tend to respect are good manners
and social behaviors, whereas the focus of the Americans’ respect is the per-
son, and in particular the person’s feelings, as will be obvious from table 5.4.
The prevalence of words such as to care, inconsiderate, feelings readily leads
students to wonder what the equivalent of such words might be in French. As
it turns out, there is no equivalent. There is no way of translating phrases
such as ‘‘How do you feel?’’ The direct translation in French would be ‘‘Com-
ment tu te sens?,’’ which in French refers only to the physical well-being of a
 Reading Between the Cultural Lines 83

Table 5.4 American and French Students’ Responses Concerning Rudeness

A Rude Person Une Personne Impolie

§ annoying, over-bearing § à qui je préfère ne pas adresser la

§ interrupts and not listen parole
§ isn’t considerate of other people. § d’ininteressant, de faible
§ shows people no respect § de bestial, qui ne s’integre pas bien
§ that says inconsiderate things dans la société, qui se fout des
§ who cuts you in line. conventions établies
§ who disregards the people around § de traumatisée
him/her. § qui a oublié son savoir-vivre chez soi
§ who disrespects opinions which di√er § qui a une tenue incorrect vis-à-vis
from his own, who knows the d’autrui, qui bouscule une personne
unwritten rules of conduct and âgée
chooses to break them anyway. § qui est grossier, rustre et
§ who does not respect others irrespectueux
§ who doesn’t care about other peoples’ § qui est vulgaire, qui est grossiere
feelings § qui n’éprouve aucune gêne envers les
§ who doesn’t care about others. autres dans ses actes et paroles
§ who doesn’t listen to others before § qui ne dit pas ‘‘merci,’’ ‘‘s’il vous plaît’’
expressing an opinion, who § qui ne tient pas la porte, qui rentre
disrespects others dans l’ascenseur avant que les autres
§ who doesn’t respect the rights or sortent, etc
feelings of others § qui ne dit pas bonjour
§ who doesn’t take others into § qui ne fait jamais l’e√ort de penser
consideration avec les yeux d’autrui
§ who ignores others § qui ne respecte pas l’autre
§ who insults others and is not § qui ne respecte pas les autres ni les
considerate of others feelings usages de la vie en société
§ who is a poor winner § qui ne respecte pas les bonnes
§ who is disrespectful manières ou qui ne fait pas attention
§ who is ignorant aux autres
§ who is inconsiderate of other people’s § qui ne respecte pas les usages
feelings § qui ne respecte pas son prochain
§ who is inconsiderate to others § qui ne respecte que ‘‘son nombril’’
§ who is insensitive to others’ feelings § qui ne se respecte pas, ne respecte pas
§ who is not respectful son interlocuteur, qui refuse de
§ who is obnoxious comprendre et d’intégrer les
§ who is selfish, greedy, and thoughtless coutumes de son interlocuteur
§ who openly attacks unjustifiably § qui ne se retient jamais
§ who oversteps his or her bounds § qui ne se soucie pas des attentes des
§ who pushes people in a crowd to get autres
to the front § qui ne vous respecte pas
84 Gilberte Furstenberg

Table 5.4 Continued

A Rude Person Une Personne Impolie

§ who talks when other people are § qui pense tout d’abord à elle-même,
talking et qui n’hésitera pas à s’inviter chez
des gens qu’elle connaît
§ qui répond mal et qui se mouche
dans les rideaux
§ qui sénerve quand il n’est pas
d’accord
§ qui se fiche des autres
§ qui vous bouscule sans s’excuser
§ qui vous marche sur les pieds sans
dire pardon
§ sans respect

person (for example, ‘‘je me sens bien’’ or ‘‘je me sens mal’’). Similarly, there
is no way of translating ‘‘I understand your feelings’’ or ‘‘she is a very caring,
considerate person.’’ The closest would be ‘‘Je comprends ce que tu veux dire’’
(‘‘I understand what you mean’’).
Again, the simple process of juxtaposition makes the readers aware of the
connotations and meanings of words as well as the impossibility of always
transposing one word with another in another culture. It allows students to
reach a real sense of the interconnectedness of language and culture. To echo
Bahktin’s words, ‘‘A meaning only reveals its depths once it has encountered
and come into contact with another foreign meaning.’’
In the next step of Cultura, students are encouraged to look for patterns
and to see whether the observations they made in one specific context can be
transferred to other contexts. By making cross-analyses—links between dif-
ferent words, sentences, or situations—students will notice, for instance, that
American students tend frequently to inject an a√ective slant into many
situations, whereas French students tend to look at a situation from a much
more rational or even aloof point of view. For instance, when answering
questions about un bon parent, un bon prof, un bon médecin (a good parent, a
good teacher, a good doctor), the French tend to give responses pertaining to
the role or function of that person. Un bon médecin and un bon prof are,
above all, professionally competent, and in France a good parent is someone
who éduque his or her children in the French sense of the word, that is, instills
values. Americans, on the other hand, often seem to place, again, a much
higher value on a√ective qualities. A good parent loves unconditionally; a
 Reading Between the Cultural Lines 85

good doctor is caring; a good teacher is someone who can teach and care, or
who deeply cares about the learning process.
Each word, sentence, situation o√ered to the students for analysis then
leads to a forum, which in turn provides yet another crucial resource for
helping them read between the cultural lines. These Web-based forums,
written in the students’ native language, are central to the task, because they
provide students with the opportunity to enter into an exchange with their
counterparts, to ask for help in deciphering meanings of words or concepts,
to present their own hypotheses and points of view, and to ask for help in
verifying these hypotheses. The forums provide a common space for nego-
tiating meanings and interpretations, as is shown in the examples below.
Example 1 (from the fall 2000 forums) illustrates the type of questions a
French student will ask and the type of response an American student will
give concerning the words United States/Etats-Unis. Again, student input is
unedited.

A. R. (INT)—10:33am Oct 9, 2000 (#2 of 49)

Dans ce questionnaire vous insistez sur ‘opportunity,’ mais dans quel sens: de
rencontrer de nombreuses personnes, de faire des expériences variées, de
travail? (In this questionnaire, you insist on ‘‘opportunity’’ but in what sense?
in the sense of meeting many people? having varied work experiences?)
To this two American students responded as follows:

S. T. (MIT)—02:12am Oct 15, 2000 (#12 of 49)

By opportunity, we mean it in many di√erent ways. For example, the people of
America are very diverse, and especially in college, we make friends that come
from all di√erent backgrounds (cultural, economic, etc). The opportunities to
study whatever we want is very apparent, since in most universities, you have
until sophomore year to declare a major. From talking to several French
friends this summer, I got the sense that they were never exposed to lots of
other cultures that I have been exposed to (Korean, even Vietnamese, whose
country was taken over by France several decades ago), and one of them told
me he had to narrow down his choice of major ever since high school and has
never taken courses outside of his major. Also, I believe jobs are easier to find.

P. T. (MIT)—06:25pm Oct 15, 2000 (#18 of 49)

Hello Alex,
Let my try to answer your question regarding the word ‘‘opportunity.’’ Op-
portunity is basically used in the sense of work, in the sense of going up in
the hierarchical pyramid of society. Work opportunities in this country are
86 Gilberte Furstenberg

greater than in most other countries. The rate at which people changes jobs is
much greater than that of Europe. Unemployment is also much lower. This
can lead to better lifestyles, etc. etc.

Certainly, such clarifications of the word provide a richer explanation than

the one found in any dictionary. They also have the advantage of providing a
totally contextualized insider’s view of a word and a sense of its di√erent
shades of meaning.
In example 2 (from the fall 2000 forum the words freedom and liberté) it is
shown how an association of words commonly made in one culture may be
perceived as problematic by another.

V. G. (int-evry.fr)—10:02am Oct 9, 2000 (#1 of 23)

Pourquoi associer liberté et religion? (Why associate freedom and religion?)
Two replies to the French student who asked this question are given below.

R. S.—05:38pm Oct 15, 2000 (#10 of 23)

Vincent,
Liberty is associated with freedom of religion. This is especially so in the US
where the constitution guarantees the right to believe in and practise dif-
ferent religions. So one has the freedom or liberty to choose one’s own
religion and practise it as she thinks fit.
In answer 2, another American student builds on the same point.

E. W.—08:51am Oct 16, 2000 (#13 of 23)

America was founded by people who wanted to escape religious persecution.
Because of this, freedom of religion was incorporated in the Constitution as a
fundamental right of American citizens. Now, freedom of religion and the
freedom of thought is an integral part of American society. In my opinion,
this is why Americans link liberty and religion.
Such forums provide an apt means of illuminating the historical roots of a
phenomenon, and in this case, for explaining to the French the reasons why
the words freedom and religion are so closely associated.
A detailed look at another forum demonstrates how American and French
students tried to elucidate for each other their di√erent concepts of individu-
alisme and to build, with each other’s help, a better understanding of what
this word represents in their respective cultures. In the process of doing so,
students made observations, drew hypotheses, responded to issues raised,
and raised issues themselves, getting an increasingly closer look into each
 Reading Between the Cultural Lines 87

other’s culture. The example below is taken from the forums of fall 1999 (for a
look at the whole transcript, see the appendix to this chapter).
The forum started in the following manner. A French student began by
summarizing the obvious di√erences he has seen emerge out of the juxtapo-
sition of the words individualism and individualisme. He writes, ‘‘Visiblement
[What an appropriate way to begin!], notre conception du mot individual-
ism ou individualisme n’est pas du tout la même! En e√et en France, celui-ci
a un sens plutôt péjoratif très associé au sens du mot égoisme. Pour vous, il
semble plutôt que ce soit la considération naturelle envers un individu, un
mot associé au sens de liberté individuelle. En France, on est plus enclin à
s’intéresser au groupe et l’individu a moins de place’’ (Obviously, our notion
of the word individualism or individualisme is completely di√erent! Indeed in
France that word has a rather pejorative meaning closely associated with the
word egotism. For you, it seems it has more to do with a natural consideration
toward an individual, a word associated with the notion of individual free-
dom. In France, we are more inclined to be interested in the group, and the
individual plays less of a role).
Another French student, Karine, made a similar summary and ended by
wondering whether, though she finds the esprit d’initiative (entrepreneurial
spirit) a very good thing, it might not get in the way of teamwork. Her
phrasing made it clear that, in her mind, the two are incompatible. ‘‘Ainsi,
pour les américains, l’esprit d’initiative est très valorisé et je trouve cela très
bien, mais ne pensez-vous pas que le travail de groupe est aussi très enrichis-
sant?’’ (So, for Americans, the entrepreneurial spirit is highly valued and I
think that is good. But don’t you think that group work is also very fulfilling?)
Such remarks reinforce the American students’ initial perceptions that the
French seem to value le groupe much more than l’individu.
A French student, Anne-Laure, then intervened with a hypothesis as to the
reasons behind the American emphasis on the ‘‘self ’’: ‘‘Peut-être cette di√é-
rence est-elle due à l’histoire des Etats-Unis, nation plus récente, où les auto-
didactes sont encouragés, tout comme l’esprit d’initiative, dans la création
d’entreprises ou en recherche par exemple’’ (This di√erence may be due to
the history of the United States, a more recent nation where self-made men as
well as the entrepreneurial spirit were encouraged in order to create busi-
nesses or research, for example).
Michael, yet another French student, then wondered if this whole issue
might not just be a matter of semantics: ‘‘C’est sans doute plus un problème
de vocabulaire que de culture, car je ne crois pas que ‘l’égoïsme,’ ou la
‘fermeture d’esprit’ (associations que font les Français) soient des qualités aux
Etats-Unis. L’individualisme au sens américain du terme se rapprocherait
88 Gilberte Furstenberg

plutôt de ce que nous appelons le ‘développement personnel’ ou l’a≈rmation

de soi.’’ (This is probably more a semantic issue than a cultural one, because I
don’t think that ‘‘egotism’’ or ‘‘closedness of mind’’ [the associations made by
the French] are viewed as qualities in the United States. Individualism in the
American sense would be closer to what we call personal development or self-
assertion.)
At this point, the first American student, Catherine, expressed her total
shock at such opposing French and American points of view and wrote: ‘‘Hi
everyone! When I first read the words all of you used associating to ‘individu-
alism,’ I felt completely shocked. The ideal that Americans hold so closely to
themselves is scorned by another country! It is so fascinating that we have
such di√erent interpretations of the ‘same’ word!’’ Then, responding to a
point raised earlier by one of the French students, she went on: ‘‘An egotist is
also looked badly upon here. ‘Individualism’ in our terms means indepen-
dence. The connotation concentrates on the idea that a person does not need
to and should not conform to all the ideas other people have. Everyone
should think for himself or herself. It is important to us not to have to
depend on others for everything.’’ She responded to yet another point raised
by the French by making clear that there is no incompatibility whatsoever
between the notion of individualism and teamwork: ‘‘A few of you men-
tioned the idea of group work as well. We believe that group work is a good
thing. An egotist would not participate in a group because he/she would
think that he/she is too good and smart for the group. Yet an individual
would work in a group because he/she can share their individually thought
up ideas with the group to result in more ideas generated.’’
Finally, Catherine attempted to hypothesize why there might be such dif-
ferences between the French and the American views: ‘‘But I do think that it
has a lot to do with the way the U.S. developed into a country. When the
colonies were under British rules, most of the normal people did as they were
told. But a few individuals realized that people deserved better so they got
together and shared their ideas and ideals. That eventually led to a revolution
and the rest is history. Perhaps at one time, those few individuals were seen as
egotists trying to do something completely crazy. Maybe because they suc-
ceeded, the term individualism slowly developed in a more positive light. Or
maybe I am completely wrong with that idea.’’
Matthew, another American student, intervened and, building on Cather-
ine’s attempt at an explanation wrote: ‘‘As she [Catherine] mentioned, the
United States grew out of a desire to be independent from Britain whereas
France grew out of a desire for equality for all. The French revolution resulted
 Reading Between the Cultural Lines 89

in the removal of nobles with an unequal share of rights and privileges.

Americans view individualism as growing above your environment to be the
most you can.’’
Then Miranda came in, responding directly to Karine’s question about
whether individualism might get in the way of teamwork. She wrote: ‘‘In
response to Karine, I think that the United States does praise individualism,
however, not at the expense of teamwork. Especially in education, teamwork
is considered vital to learning. I don’t think that the two have to be consid-
ered opposing ideas.’’
Claudiu, another MIT student, concurred: ‘‘To answer Karine: Working in
groups is definitely a good thing. I’m thinking of study groups, for example,
which are quite popular at MIT (although not allowed by some courses).
When solving a problem of general interest say for a company working in a
group is a requirement. However, shaping one’s own career (to illustrate the
positive connotation of individualism) cannot be a group activity.’’
At this point, the French students presumably were aware that their initial
premise about the incompatibility of individualism with teamwork was a
faulty one. Through the comments from the MIT students, they were also
given a glimpse of education at the Institute.
The discussion took a new turn when Christian, a French student, made
another type of distinction: he noticed that the French reactions to the word
individualisme tended to be negative when put in a personal context but more
positive when seen within an institutional context. He wrote: ‘‘Ainsi, du côté
des réponses positives, les français décrivent l’individualisme d’un point de
vue ‘institutionnel’ (capitalisme, libéralisme, indépendance, liberté), tandis
que les Américains se situent dans une logique plus ‘personnelle.’ L’individu-
alisme n’est dès lors pas un comportement propre à un ensemble social ou le
fruit d’une doctrine, mais le fruit d’une décision personnelle, justement en
rupture avec la société, comme en témoignent les réponses mode de vie,
anticonformisme, choix. En revanche, lorsqu’il s’agit des aspects négatifs les
français se situent au niveau strictement individuel. L’individualiste devient
alors un être égocentrique, solitaire et fermé d’esprit.’’ (So, if one looks at the
positive responses, the French describe individualism from an institutional
point of view [capitalism, liberalism, independence, freedom] whereas the
Americans situate themselves within a more personal framework. As a conse-
quence, individualism [for the Americans] is not the behavior of a social
group or the result of a doctrine but the result of a personal decision, precisely
in opposition to society, as is shown by such examples as ‘‘way of life,’’ ‘‘non-
conformist,’’ ‘‘choice.’’ On the other hand, when talking about the negative
90 Gilberte Furstenberg

aspects, the French situate themselves strictly at an individual level. An indi-

vidualist then becomes egocentric, solitary and closed-minded.)
Then Ludovic o√ered a compromise view, although his fear of individual-
ism showed through: ‘‘Il y a, je pense, à prendre des deux côtés: nous aurions
à gagner en France à laisser développer l’imagination, la créativité des indi-
vidus; mais il y a, aux US, un ‘revers de médaillon’: à trop vouloir pousser
l’individualisme, il me semble qu’on s’isole toujours un peu plus.’’ (There is, I
believe, something to be learned from both sides: it would be to our advan-
tage in France to nurture the imagination and creativity of individuals; but
there is also the other side of the coin in the United States: if one pushes the
notion of individualism too far, it seems that one might get more and more
isolated.)
Finally, Liana, an MIT student, presented yet another perspective by
adding a word of caution to the French: do not think that individualism is
looked on positively by everybody. It may be the case at MIT, but ‘‘I think that
among some other groups in America, individualism is not seen so positively.
There are many stories of people who have di√erent opinions, di√erent
fashions, etc. being considered wrong or dangerous by their communities
(schools, towns, and so on). So I don’t think that every American would
agree that individualism is a good characteristic, even though it is very im-
portant to me.’’
Such conversations go a long way in making students better attuned to
each other’s di√ering cultural perspectives and in bridging their initial cul-
tural gap.
In terms of language per se, these forums provide our students with an
extraordinary source of authentic French language, in terms of vocabulary
and discourse. The MIT students regularly bring back into the classroom
French comments they have found particularly illuminating and relate them
to their classmates via words they have ‘‘borrowed’’ from the French. By
virtue of being written in the students’ ‘‘native’’ language, the forums also
o√er—for the Americans—living examples of authentic French discourse,
which then becomes an object of analysis in its own right. Quite often MIT
students will notice how the French tend almost systematically to present
both sides of the coin: the word mais (but) appears repeatedly. They will also
remark on how highly structured the French discourse is (‘‘Ainsi, du côté des
réponses positives, les Français . . . tandis que les Américains . . .’’ ‘‘L’individu-
alisme n’est dès lors pas . . . mais le fruit d’une décision personnelle, juste-
ment en rupture avec la société, comme en témoignent les réponses. . . . En
revanche, lorsqu’il s’agit des aspects négatifs. . . . L’individualiste devient alors
un être égocentrique.’’
 Reading Between the Cultural Lines 91

Interestingly enough, students almost always spontaneously model the

French discourse in their own subsequent writings in French. It is important
at this point to emphasize that the MIT students use English only on the Web.
The class discussions and the writings are always done in French. The reverse
is true for the INT students.
Now in normal educational circumstances, students do not have an infor-
mant at their side assisting them in deciphering the hidden meanings of a
text; they need to be able to do that on their own. Cultura constitutes a
stepping stone, helping students become more fully aware of embedded
cultural assumptions and better equipped for decoding a foreign meaning.
The questionnaires and their accompanying forums, however, constitute
only the first stage. Students then compare many other materials, such as
French and American national opinion polls (so as to put their earlier find-
ings into a much broader and more objective sociocultural framework), a
French film and its American remake, news as portrayed in the American and
the French press, and a variety of historical, literary, and sociological texts.
Each time, students are expected to transfer their newly found cross-cultural
skills to the reading of these texts and contexts.
Students will, for instance, work with the printed news and compare not
only what the New York Times and Le Monde cover on a given day but how
they cover the same event. One day, two students, completely on their own
initiative, did a comparative study of the way both newspapers talked about
Chechnya. Not only did they describe what events the newspapers focused
on, but they analyzed the contexts that the newspapers supplied, or did not
supply, and even the words used when referring to Russia and Chechnya.
They came up with extraordinary insights that clearly brought out the re-
spective underlying points of view. I am convinced that, had they not worked
with Cultura before then, their level of analysis would have been much less
subtle and sophisticated.
Toward the end of the semester, students are clearly able to access the
underlying and implicit judgments found in a French text. For instance,
when reading an article from the French newsmagazine Le Point (17 October
1998) titled ‘‘Les nouveaux pionniers francais,’’ which describes life for the
French pioneers in Silicon Valley, students never fail to uncover the underly-
ing biases contained in the introduction to the article:

Diplômes français en poche, ils sont déjà 40.000 à avoir débarqué dans la
‘‘Valley,’’ véritable locomotive des hautes technologies et des nouveaux mé-
dias. Pour ces émigrés de luxe, un eldorado, mais au prix de conditions de vie
pas spécialement gaies.
92 Gilberte Furstenberg

(With French diplomas in their pockets, 40,000 of them have already

disembarked in the Valley, that real locomotive of high technology and new
media. For these deluxe immigrants, an Eldorado but with a particularly
unfortunate toll on lifestyle.)

Our students are able to see it all: ‘‘Diplômes français en poche’’ (the pride of
the French to see that their degrees are really prized in the United States!); ‘‘ils
débarquent’’ (the mythical voyage!); ‘‘ces émigrés de luxe, un eldorado’’ (Ah,
the call of money! That’s what the United States is all about!); and the inevita-
ble mais, followed by ‘‘au prix de conditions de vie pas spécialement gaies’’
(implicit message: life in France is much better). By that point in the course,
our students could almost have taken on the persona of a French journalist
and written that article.
My colleagues and I are often surprised to discover how deep and insight-
ful some of the students’ comments are and how proficient they become at
identifying cultural features and at making relevant connections—to the
point where their perceptions, unbeknownst to them, match the findings of
cross-cultural experts.
In that context, it is worth revisiting Matthew’s words in the forum about
‘‘individualism’’: ‘‘The United States grew out of a desire to be independent
from Britain whereas France grew out of a desire for equality for all. The
French revolution resulted in the removal of nobles with an unequal share of
rights and privileges.’’ He was unknowingly echoing the words of Tocqueville,
who had written in 1830: ‘‘Le grand avantage des Américains est d’être arrivés
à la démocratie sans avoir à sou√rir des révolutions démocratiques et d’être
nés égaux avant de le devenir’’ (De Toqueville 1961, p. 147). (The great advan-
tage of the Americans is that they have reached freedom without having had
to su√er through democratic revolutions and to have been born equal as
opposed to becoming equal.)
This excerpt is one of those provided to the students in the library module,
the final one in the Cultura process. Such texts, by virtue of being accessed at
the end, instead of at the beginning, take on a lot more resonance for the
students. They help the Cultura students measure how far they have come in
the process of deciphering French culture and discover how close their own
analysis sometimes comes to that of these experts. These texts also help
illuminate the historical and philosophical roots of cultural phenomena that
they themselves have deduced. The excerpt by Tocqueville, for instance, helps
explain to the MIT students why the notions of freedom and equality
are viewed as inseparable by the French. This is something MIT students
had already noticed when they had analyzed the French responses to the
 Reading Between the Cultural Lines 93

words freedom and liberté and had observed that words such as limitée,
autrui, and égalité kept recurring on the French side. That very close connec-
tion between the notions of égalité and of liberté becomes even more appar-
ent to the American students if they happen to read Article 4 of the Déclara-
tion des Droits de l’Homme (in the library module), which says: ‘‘La liberté
consiste à pouvoir faire tout ce qui ne nuit pas à autrui: ainsi, l’exercise des
droits naturels de chaque homme n’a de bornes que celles qui assurent aux
autres membres de la société la jouissance de ces mêmes droits.’’ (Freedom
consists in being able to do everything that is not harmful to others: conse-
quently, the only limits to the exercise of each man’s natural rights are those
that guarantee the other members of society the enjoyment of those same
rights.)
In Teaching and Assessing Intercultural Communicative Competence, Mi-
chael Byram defines what a true intercultural speaker is (we can substitute
here the word reader):
The intercultural speaker can ‘‘read’’ a document or event, analyzing its
origin and sources—e.g., in the media, in political speech or historical writ-
ing—and the meanings and values which arise from a national or other
ethnocentric perspective (stereotypes, historical connotations in texts) and
which are presupposed and implicit, leading to conclusions which can be
challenged from a di√erent perspective.

The intercultural speaker can identify causes of misunderstanding (e.g.,

use of concepts apparently similar but with di√erent meanings or connota-
tions . . . the intercultural speaker can use . . . explanations of sources of
misunderstanding and dysfunction to help interlocutors overcome conflict-
ing perspectives [and] can explain the perspective of each and the origins of
those perspectives in terms accessible to the other. (Byram 1997, p. 61)
I believe that our Cultura students, having honed their skills at reading
between the cultural lines, are well on their way to becoming, as Byram
writes, literate intercultural readers.

References
Bahktin, M. (1986). Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, edited by Caryl Emerson and
Michael Holquist and translated by Vern W. McGee. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Byram, M. (1997). Teaching and Assessing Intercultural Communicative Competence.
Clevedon, U.K.: Multilingual Matters.
De Tocqueville, A. (1961). De la démocratie en Amérique. Paris: Gallimard, Folio Histoire.
Makine, A. (1995). Le Testament français. Paris: Gallimard Folio Histoire. Dreams of My
Russian Summers, translated by Geo√rey Strachan. New York: Arcade, 1997.
94 Gilberte Furstenberg

APPENDIX: FORUMS ON THE WORD ASSOCIATION EXERCISE FOR

INDIVIDUALISM/INDIVIDUALISME, FALL 1999
Alexis N—12:44pm Oct 12, 1999 (#1 of 16)
Visiblement notre conception du mot individualism ou individualisme n’est
pas du tout la meme! En e√et en France, celui-ci a un sens plutot pejoratif tres
associe au sens du mot egoisme. Pour vous, il semble plutot que ce soit la conside-
ration naturelle envers un individu, un mot associe au sens de liberte individuelle.
En France, on est plus enclin a s’interesser au groupe et l’individu a moins de
place au niveau du langage, je pense cependant que l’individualisme est largement
present en France, meme si on l’avoue peut-etre plus di≈cilement. Comment
definiriez-vous le mot individualism, comment le vivez-vous?

Marine T—02:34pm Oct 12, 1999 (#2 of 16)

bonjour! j’ai observé nos réponses à propos du mot individualisme, et il
semble qu’aux Etats-Unis, cela semble revendiqué comme une valeur américaine,
liée à l’intégrité, alors qu’en France, cela est plutôt considéré comme un comporte-
ment malsaint. Je crois en fait que nous n’avons pas la même idée de ce qu’est
l’individualisme, et cela à cause de nos di√érences culturelles. Ainsi, pour les améri-
cains, l’esprit d’initiative est très valorisé et je trouve cela très bien, mais ne pensez-
vous pas que le travail de groupe est aussi très enrichissant?

Anne-Laure L—05:47am Oct 13, 1999 (#3 of 16)

La di√erence entre les deux conceptions de l’individualisme est en e√et tres
nette. Si en France, l’individualisme est percu comme de l’egoisme ou une ferme-
ture au monde, aux Etats-Unis, il permet d’a≈rmer sa di√erence et de construire sa
liberte par des choix. Cette notion est donc naturellement liee aux Etats-Unis et au
capitalisme. Peut-etre cette di√erence est-elle due a l’histoire des Etats-Unis, nation
plus recente, ou les autodidactes sont encourages, tout comme l’esprit d’initiative,
dans la creation d’entreprises ou en recherche par exemple. Par contre, je ne saia pas
si l’individualisme americain se fait au detriment de l’esprit de groupe, qui ne me
semble pas tellement plus encourage en France.

Amelie S—06:35am Oct 13, 1999 (#4 of 16)

Nos diÎrences de conception du mot individualisme sont flagrantes. Nous
associons individualime à égoisme et égocentrisme, l’individualiste est pour nous
celui qui marche sur les autres pour progresser tandis que pour vous il s’agit de
liberté. En fait, vos comportements sociaux sont très di√érents des nôtres, même si
l’écart semble s’atténuer un peu ces dernières années, tant aux niveau de la vie en
entreprise que dans la vie de tous les jours. Je pense que cette diÎrence fondamen-
tale est due à nos bagages historiques et politiques respectifs. L’individualisme est
pour nous un comportement méprisé au profit peut-être de la solidarité et de
l’esprit d’équipe. Qu’en est-t’il de ces valeurs chez vous?
 Reading Between the Cultural Lines 95

Laurent J—10:25am Oct 13, 1999 (#5 of 16)

Les self-made men ne sont pas monnaie courante en France. Pour nous, la
seule entite capable de fournir des resultats probants est une equipe d’individus
dans laquelle on peut eventuellement trouver une certaine competition, qui peut a
la rigueur pousser a un comportement individualiste. L’individualisme est apprecie
uniquement dans ce cas, au sein d’une competition amicale. J’ai l’impression que
vous assimilez l’individualisme a une espece d’originalite, tres loin de tout esprit de
competition. Ne pensez-vous pas que la competition, la concurrence pure et dure,
coute trop chere?

Michael W—04:32pm Oct 13, 1999 (#6 of 16)

En france, ‘‘individualisme’’ a une connotation très négative, alors qu’aux
Etats-Unis, le mot a une consonnace très positive. Par ailleurs, la notion d’individu-
alisme semble être, pour les américains, parfaitement assumée: c’est un ‘‘choix’’ lié à
une volonté de se démarquer, d’a≈rmer sa liberté . . . Manifestement, nous n’avons
pas la même definition du mot ‘‘individualisme.’’ C’est sans doute plus un problème
de vocabulaire que de culture, car je ne crois pas que l’ ‘‘égoîsme,’’ ou la ‘‘fermeture
d’esprit’’ (associations que font les français) soient des qualités aux Etats-Unis.
L’individualisme au sens américain du terme se rapprocherait plutôt de ce que nous
appelons le ‘‘développement personnel’’ ou l’a≈rmation de soi.

Alexis C—06:38pm Oct 13, 1999 (#7 of 16)

Le terme Individualisme a une signification très di√érente en France et aux
Etats-Unis. Du côté français, l’individualisme n’a visiblement pas le succés qu’il
a aux Etats-Unis. L’individualisme est considéré comme un défaut par les fran-
çais car ils semblent considérer l’individualisme comme une sorte de manière
de tout vouloir pour soi (égoïsme est très souvent cité). Les Etats-Unis et le
modèle capitaliste sont aussi rattachés au terme individualisme par les Français, ce
qui semble être vérifié quand on considère que les Américains voient l’indivi-
dualisme comme important et comme une manière de vivre et de se sentir libre et
di√érent des autres. Les Américains semblent ne pas accepter d’être absorbés par
la masse.

Catherine K N—02:56am Oct 14, 1999 (#8 of 16)

Hi everyone! When I first read the words all of you used associating to
‘‘individualism’’ I felt completely shocked. The ideal that Americans hold so closely
to themselves is scorned by another country! It is so fascinating that we have such
di√erent interpretations of the ‘‘same’’ word! =) I think that the main di√erence
between our usage of the two words involves the context in which we derive it from.
For you in France, ‘‘individualisme’’ focuses on the idea that the person believes
that he or she could do anything and everything by himself or herself. In the U.S.,
we simply call the person an egotist. Slang terms for that would include ‘‘smart
96 Gilberte Furstenberg

aleck,’’ ‘‘wise guy,’’ and ‘‘know-it all.’’ An egotist is also looked badly upon here.
‘‘Individualism’’ in our terms means independence. The connotation concentrates
on the idea that a person does not need to and should not conform to all the ideas
other people have. Everyone should think for himself or herself. It is important to
us not to have to depend on others for everything. A few of you mentioned the idea
of group work as well. We believe that group work is a good thing. An egotist would
not participate in a group because he/she would think that he/she is too good and
smart for the group. Yet an individual would work in a group because he/she can
share their individually thought up ideas with the group to result in more ideas
generated. I don’t personally know how this word’s meaning changed so drastically
through history. But I do think that it has a lot to do with the way the U.S. developed
into a country. When the colonies were under British rules, most of the normal
people did as they were told. But a few individuals realized that people deserved
better so they got together and shared their ideas and ideals. That eventually led to a
revolution and the rest is history. Perhaps at one time, those few individuals were
seen as egotists trying to do something completely crazy. Maybe because they
succeeded, the term individualism slowly developed in a more positive light. Or
maybe I am completely wrong with that idea. =)

Matthew R F—08:34am Oct 14, 1999 (#9 of 16)

I agree with Catherine that how the countries developed has a lot to do with
the connotations and some to do with the denotations of individualism. As she
mentioned, the United States grew out of a desire to be independent from Britain
where as France grew out out of a desire for equality for all. The French revolution
resulted in the removal of nobles with an unequal share of rights and privileges.
Americans view individualism as growing above your environment to be the most
you can.

Dmitry S N—06:01pm Oct 14, 1999 (#10 of 16)

Having read the previous responses, I realized that ‘there is no p̃roblem’—we
simply understand the word ‘individualism’ di√erently. They are like two di√erent
words for you and us, though they happen to be spelled similarly. My question then
is, how do you call the person who evidently pursues his or her career, is not afraid
of taking decisions, develops his/her personality etc? Also, from my experience with
Western Europe (I studied there for a year and have been there many times), it
seems that people there try to eliminate/diminish competition, or at least not
to notice it. What is the attitude in whatever group of people (same class at school,
same company) to anyone who obviously tries to go beyond, works harder, tries to
succeed? Do you start respecting him/her more, or vice-versa, think about such
person as ‘someone who wants too much’, ‘shows o√ ’, ‘thinking only about ca-
reer’ etc?
 Reading Between the Cultural Lines 97

Miranda L P—06:28pm Oct 17, 1999 (#11 of 16)

In response to Marine, I think that the United States does praise individual-
ism, however not at the expense of teamwork. Especially in education, teamwork is
considered vital to learning. I don’t think that the two have to be considered
opposing ideas. Like Catherine said, individualism can exist within a group. Indi-
vidualism as Americans know it goes beyond ‘‘being an individual.’’ It also has a lot
to do with finding value in the ideas of man and seeing the power to change that
each person has.

Claudiu A G—02:31am Oct 18, 1999 (#12 of 16)

I see that for French ‘‘individualisme’’ means acting for oneself and being
selfish. Obviously, in US, the word having a close spelling means acting by oneself
and having one’s own way. I was wondering (since these words have a common
root, ‘‘individual’’) if in France referring to a person as an ‘‘individual’’ has some-
how a negative connotation. To answer Marine: Working in groups is definitely a
good thing. I’m thinking of study groups, for example, which are quite popular at
MIT (although not allowed by some courses). When solving a problem of general
interest say for a company working in a group is a requirement. However, shaping
one’s own career (to illustrate the positive connotation of individualism) cannot be
a group activity.

Christine A K—03:15am Oct 18, 1999 (#13 of 16)

Hmm . . . do you think that the people in charge paired individualisme with
individualism on purpose to create conflict in our responses? I suspect so . . . I think
it is interesting to uncover the quirks and little di√erences in languages. History
really does shade meanings and connotations of words.
And in response to Alexis, when I read what you said about Americans not
wanting to be absorbed into the masses, I shuddered. That sounds really horrible. I
think that most people like to stand out as individuals and to be seen for the unique
people they are. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think that ‘‘conformity’’ has a very
negative connotation in the US. Is this the same in France?

Christian B—09:48am Oct 18, 1999 (#14 of 16)

Réactions aux réponses sur l’individualisme. D’emblée on constate que les
Américains ont une vision globalement positive de la notion d’individualisme (à
92%), tandis que les français la considère plutôt négativement. On notera ensuite
que hormis l’indépendance et l’égocentrisme, aucune des réponses proposées n’est
commune aux 2 pays. Ainsi, du côté des réponses positives, les français décrivent
l’individualisme d’un point de vue ‘‘institutionnel’’ (capitalisme, libéralisme, indé-
pendance, liberté), tandis que les Américains se situent dans une logique plus
‘‘personnelle.’’ L’individualisme n’est dès lors pas un comportement propre à un
98 Gilberte Furstenberg

ensemble social ou le fruit d’une doctrine, mais le fruit d’une décision personnelle,
justement en rupture avec la société, comme en témoignent les réponses mode de
vie, anticonformisme, choix. En revanche, lorsqu’il s’agit des aspects négatifs les
français se situent au niveau strictement individuel. L’individualiste devient alors
un être égocentrique, solitaire et fermé d’esprit.

Ludovic M—10:27am Oct 18, 1999 (#15 of 16)

E√ectivement, je pense que Matthew nous o√re une très bonne synthèse, qui
explique simplement nos di√érences quant à l’appréhension de l’individualisme. Il
y a, je pense, à prendre des deux côtés: nous aurions à gagner en France à laisser
développer l’imagination, la créativité des individus; mais il y a, aux US, un ‘‘revers
de médaillon’’: à trop vouloir pousser l’individualisme, il me semble qu’on s’isole
toujours un peu plus, et, même si l’on peut au début a≈rmer la force de son entité,
l’on arrive à mal vivre son unicité. Partager, communiquer et échanger pour s’en-
richir de l’expérience des autres, on peut aussi le faire de façon unique.

Liana F L—11:46am Oct 18, 1999 (#16 of 16)

As has been said, we obviously have very di√erent ideas of what the word
means. MIT students in particular tend to be the people who were the outsiders in
their high school, because they did better in classes and sometimes weren’t so
popular. I think that among some other groups in America, individualism is not
seen so positively. There are many stories of people who have di√erent opinions,
di√erent fashions, etc, being considered wrong or dangerous by their communities
(schools, town, and so on). So I don’t think that every American would agree that
individualism is a good characteristic, even though it is very important to me.
 6

Reading and Technology in Less Commonly

Taught Languages and Cultures
masako ueda fidler

Preliminaries: Reading Forms in Discourse and in

Cultural Contexts
Interpreting a text is one of the most important components of lan-
guage learning. Although it is a complicated procedure for any learner, it is
especially challenging for students of less commonly taught languages. Most
of these require a large amount of time to reach a certain point of proficiency.
A teacher must spend much classroom time on formal aspects of these lan-
guages, such as various inflectional forms and complexities of the writing
system. The fact that these languages are often not taught below the college
level exacerbates the situation. Thus, when students of more commonly
taught languages may be capable of discussing literature or politics relatively
soon after entering college, students of Czech or Japanese may be struggling
to talk about their daily activities and to make simple statements about their
preferences.
This is not to say that students of less commonly taught languages do not
learn culture at the beginning level. They do become aware of di√erences in
worldview reflected in language in di√erent ways: for example, how to ex-
press simple sensations (use of the dative case for the experiencer in Czech)
and wants or impositions (the third-person -garu in Japanese), to present an

99
100 Masako Ueda Fidler

event with a focus on completion or on the occurrence of an action itself

(verbal aspect in Czech), or to report acts of giving and receiving (giving and
receiving verbs in Japanese). Because of the structural complexities of the
languages and time constraints, however, reading in these languages tends
to focus only on micro-level properties of a text: understanding the mor-
phological features of each constituent and syntactic relation.
In this chapter I shall attempt to show that a full interpretation of a text
requires consideration of not only micro-level elements but also macro-level
elements, namely, discourse strategies and historical and cultural contexts. A
cross-linguistic comparison of such strategies and contexts also belongs to
analysis on the macro level. I shall discuss how apparently puzzling micro-
level properties of a text can be interpreted fully once cultural and historical
context is incorporated into the reading process. Some of the examples will
suggest that reading based solely on micro-level properties may lead to mis-
guided interpretation of a text. I shall then go back to the issue of teaching
materials for Czech as an example of a less commonly taught language,
discuss the significance of electronic materials and the Web, and propose
possible ingredients for them.

Interpretation of Texts as a Complex Process

In order to show the significance of both micro- and macro-level as-
pects of language in interpreting texts, I shall use samples from three speakers
from di√erent cultures: former president Bill Clinton, President Vaclav Havel
of the Czech Republic, and former prime minister Yoshiro Mori of Japan. All
three political leaders reflect on events and accomplishments of the pre-
ceding year and the challenges of the new year, and all address their reflec-
tions to citizens of their countries. I do not intend to evaluate or analyze the
political abilities of these speakers. Rather, I wish to demonstrate the com-
plexities of the interaction between structural properties of texts and socio-
cultural contexts, more specifically, how certain structural properties of
texts might be e√ectively interpreted when we consider discourse/prag-
matic norm and sociohistorical context both within a language and cross-
linguistically. The features discussed here roughly correspond to what Fair-
clough defines as ‘‘relational values’’ of these texts (1989, 112). Relational
values, according to Fairclough, constitute one of the three values that are
found in a political text. They represent ‘‘trace of/cue to social relation-
ships enacted in a text.’’ This includes expression of power or authority and
rapport-building.
 Reading and Technology 101

Reading on the Micro Level

Let us first examine some of the micro-level properties of the three
speeches: sentence-level surface forms such as modifiers and predicates, in-
cluding politeness forms and modal expressions. We shall then consider
potential interpretations that may arise if the texts are interpreted merely on
the sentence level.
One of the salient features of Clinton’s speech, compared to that of the
other two, is that it has the highest frequency of the first-person singular
forms. I-forms—here and elsewhere, boldface is used to highlight the struc-
tural features under discussion—are most frequently associated with verbs of
asking (for support) and proposing and tend to be repeated in a pattern:
(1) . . . I ask you to pass a real patients’ bill of rights. [Applause] I ask you to
pass common-sense gun safety legislation. [Applause] I ask you to pass cam-
paign finance reform. [Applause] . . . And, again, I ask you—I implore you—
to raise the minimum wage. [Applause] (1/27/00)
Such sentences are preceded by a premise that is presented as a majority view.
They are often accompanied by applause explicitly noted in the transcript in
order to accentuate that many people agree with the speaker:
(2) We know that children learn best in smaller classes with good teachers. . . .
Congress has supported my plan to hire 100,000 new qualified teachers to
lower class size in the early grades. I thank you for that, and I ask you to make
it three in a row. [Applause] (1/27/00)
Such a combination of predicate types and I-forms is in agreement with
the expected function of the U.S. president: advising the Congress of his
perception of the nation’s needs and, as head of the executive branch, obtain-
ing support from others to realize his visions.
Clinton’s speeches are also rich in first-person plural forms:
(3) We will bring prosperity to every American community. . . . And we will
become at last what our founders pledged us to be so long ago—one nation,
under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. [Applause] These are
great goals, worthy of a great nation. (1/27/00)
The speaker uses them to emphasize previous and ongoing accomplishments
and future projects, presenting himself and the audience as a successful team:
(4) Crime in America has dropped for the past seven years—that’s the longest
decline on record—thanks to a national consensus we helped forge on com-
munity police, sensible gun safety laws, and e√ective prevention. [Applause]
(1/27/00)
102 Masako Ueda Fidler

These forms help engage the audience as respected members of the political
leadership. When the speaker, his administration, the Congress, or all the
American people are referred to as one entity, the speaker’s ability to collabo-
rate with various people despite apparent di√erences is being accentuated.
This observation is consistent with the frequent use of words such as ‘‘bipar-
tisan’’ and ‘‘working together.’’
In contrast, Prime Minister Mori’s approach does not explicitly utilize
first-person plural forms. Although it is somewhat similar to Clinton’s ap-
proach in that both speakers use first-person singular references with verbs of
proposing and asking, Mori’s style is marked by frequent use of politeness
markers, especially humble forms of self-reference.
(5) Kyooikukihonhoo ni tuite mo bapponteki ni minaosu hituyoo ga aru to
kangaete orimasu. . . . omoikitta kaikaku wo sekkyokuteki ni suisin site
mairimasu. (7/28/2000) (I also think [humbly] that there is a need to dras-
tically review the Basic Law on Education. . . . I will actively [humbly]
promote bold reforms on the basis of national debate.)
These forms might be interpreted as the speaker’s markedly respectful at-
titude toward the audience; he is, as it were, humbly presenting the plans
of his Cabinet, ‘‘serving’’ the country, and imploring the audience to sup-
port him.
As for Havel’s speeches, first-person references are connected for the most
part with processes of thinking, believing, or knowing.
(6) Věřím, že nadcházející rok přinese nové impulzy . . . (1/1/95)
(I believe that the coming year will bring new impulses . . .)

(7) Nevím, zda život jako takový je či není hezký. Vím ale, že je velkou výzvou
pro každého z nás, aby se ho pokusil udělat hezkým sobě a ostatním. (1/1/98)
(I do not know whether life as such is or is not beautiful. I know, however,
that it is a great challenge for every one of us to try to make it beautiful for
oneself and for others.)
As did Clinton, Havel also uses first-person plural forms to report past ac-
complishments in reference to himself and the entire audience:
(8) Jasně jsme se přihlásili k humanistické a demokratické tradici naší
novodobé historie. (1/1/94)
(We declared our allegiance to the humanistic and democratic traditions of
our recent history.)
There are, however, a large number of situations associated with first-
person plural subjects that are simply descriptive or even negative:
 Reading and Technology 103

(9) Zbořili jsme sice už dávno velkou zed, která nás oddělovala od demok-
ratické Evropy, ale zároveň tolerujeme, že kolem nás a mezi námi zvolna a
nenápadně vyrůstají zdi nové. (1/1/99)
(Granted, we already tore down the great wall which separated us from the
democratic Europe, but simultaneously we tolerate that new walls are slowly
and inconspicuously growing around us and among us.)

These forms present the audience in relation to the speaker as political co-
players, but not necessarily in a positive light; instead, they emphasize that
both the audience and the speaker are equally accountable for various conse-
quences. The prominence of words such as odpovědnost (responsibility),
odpovědný (responsible), spoluodpovědnost (co-responsibility), and spoluod-
povědný (co-responsible) in Havel’s speeches supports this observation.
The examples from Clinton’s speech represent the president as a man of
action who makes proposals based on the values accepted by a majority of
people, who respects the audience as his successful partners, and who is
capable of working with everyone to achieve what’s good for the country and
of overcoming apparent di√erences. In contrast, the other two speakers seem
to exhibit properties that are di√erent or puzzzling. The Japanese prime
minister might produce an image of a very polite leader of a state who serves
the nation with humility. Havel’s texts may be somewhat puzzling to the
reader because they speak about his opinions rather than concrete plans and
challenges for the coming year. The reader may also wonder why he should
admit that he holds not only his citizens but also himself responsible for
negative conditions. For public relations purposes, this may appear strate-
gically ine√ective.
Such readings of texts by Havel and Mori seem reasonable on the sentence
level. They would certainly be attractive to the reader who is looking for
something distinct about other cultures such as a relatively unknown central
European state and a country in Asia with di√erent values and codes of
behavior. In fact, further examples may appear to confirm these views.

Reading Havel on the Micro Level

Let us first look at Havel’s texts more closely on the sentence level.
Havel’s modal verbs of obligation are used to suggest that the current situa-
tion is not ideal. Such an interpretation is possible especially when modal
verbs are negated (see Givon 1979, p. 139 on negation):
(10) Nesmí nám být jedno, co se děje kolem nás, jakou tvář má naše země a
její krajina, naše města a obce; nemůžeme myslet jen na to, abychom měli
104 Masako Ueda Fidler

dobr ý dům a garáž, ale musíme myslet i na to, co je obklopuje; nemůžeme

hájit jen zájmy své firmy či svého povolání. (1/1/00)
(We must not be indi√erent to what happens around us; or to the face of our
country, of its landscape, of our towns and villages; we must not think only
about having a fine house and garage of our own, but also about that which
surrounds them; we cannot defend solely the interests of our own company
or our profession.)

The reader might wonder why a president of a state criticizes the current
situation when he—as a major part of the political machinery—is responsible
for it. In contrast, modal expressions in Clinton’s speech are often accom-
panied by an implicitly positive prognosis:
(11) Now, as we demand more from our schools, we should also invest more
in our schools. [Applause] . . . If we do this, we can give every single child in
every failing school in America—everyone—the chance to meet high stan-
dards. (1/27/00)

Compare (11) with (12), in which Havel warns that some negative conse-
quences might follow should a wrong step be taken:
(12) Duch zdí může mít nakonec jediný důsledek: nenápadné ochromení tak
důležitých údů demokracie, jakými jsou princip občanské rovnosti, úcta k
nezcizitelným lidským právům . . . (1/1/99)
(The spirit of the wall can have after all one consequence: inconspicuous
paralysis of such important limbs of democracy as the principle of equality
of citizens, respect for inalienable human rights . . .)
Another interesting feature of Havel’s use of modality is that its ‘‘source’’
(Chung and Timberlake 1990, pp. 241–42), or entity that expresses obliga-
tions or necessity, is primarily the speaker. He is the individual who believes
that certain situations should hold. He is the individual who believes that
other situations are not acceptable. Compare (12) with (13), in which the
speaker’s political programs are assumed to be in accord with a widely estab-
lished value, the concept of the American Revolution:
(13) We will bring prosperity to every American community. . . . And we will
become at last what our founders pledged us to be so long ago—one nation,
under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. [Applause] These
are great goals, worthy of a great nation. (1/27/00)
The nature of modality is therefore significantly di√erent in Havel’s and
Clinton’s speeches; Havel presents himself as the major source of modality,
whereas Clinton spreads his modality over a group of people, presenting
himself as a team player. Furthermore, Havel’s speeches contain modal ex-
 Reading and Technology 105

pressions that suggest the existence of others who may not share his view.
Note the implicit contrast in (14) and (15):
(14) Je to úkol všech veřejně činných lidí, všech lidí v odpovědních posta-
veních a koneckonců všech nás, občanů České republiky, kteří to s ní my-
slíme dobře. (1/1/00)
(It is a task for all people involved in public activities; for all those holding
responsible positions; and, actually, for all of us—citizens of the Czech Re-
public who mean well for this country.)

(15) Sám sobě i nám všem nejlépe pomůže ten z nás, kdo bude . . . volit
vskutku odpovědně . . . (1/1/98)
(One who votes in a truly responsible manner . . . will help oneself and all of
us most.)

Examples (16) and (17) suggest the existence of influential people who are
slumbering instead of acting. Example (17) suggests the existence of people
who may vary in the degree to which they must confront di≈culties in
maintaining high moral principles.
(16) Musíme ji [naději] naplňovat sami. Byt’ třeba i tím, že zatřeseme všemi,
kteří mají sice vliv, ale dřímají, místo aby jednali. (1/1/00)
(We have to fulfill it [hope] ourselves. Perhaps, among other things, by
shaking up all those who possess influence but slumber instead of acting.)

(17) Všem takovýmto lidem patří dík. Dík tím větší, oč větší jsou nesnáze,
které musejí překonávat. (1/1/94)
(All such people deserve our gratitude and the greater the di≈culties they
must overcome, the greater our gratitude should be.)

The reader may again wonder why a politican even hints at the fact that not
everyone agrees with him. One may think that Havel is speaking defensively.
Havel’s speeches are also marked by a unique way of referring to individ-
uals in the third person. Such forms in Havel’s speeches are much more
anonymous than in the speeches of the other two speakers, often including
indefinite expressions such as někdo (someone) and někteří (some people).
(18) Vím ale, na co právo mám: podělit se s vámi—byt’ by to někdo stokrát
nazval moralizováním—o svůj názor na to . . . (1/1/00)
(But I know what I have the right to do: I can—even though some may
dismiss it as a mere moralizing a hundred times over—share with you my
opinion . . .)
People, who are technically sources of information, are not directly men-
tioned in Havel’s speeches; instead, abstract nouns are used:
106 Masako Ueda Fidler

(19) Různé průzkumy veřejného mínění říkají, že . . . (1/1/99)

(Various polls of public opinion say that . . .)

(20) Některé odhady říkají, že . . . (1/1/00)

(Some estimates say that . . .)

(21) O všech těchto a dalších civilizačních hrozbách ví dnešní lidstvo velmi

dobře, vždyt’ se tím zabývají samostatné vědní obory, mnohé světové
konference . . . (1/1/00)
(Humanity knows very well about all these and other threats to our civiliza-
tion, after all, independent disciplines of science, many global conferences
deal with this . . .)
Conversely, abstract notions tend to be personified in Havel’s speeches:
(22) A tak se tu znovu hlásí ke slovu naše známé a sebeničivé čecháčkovství.
(1/1/99)
(And so here again our well known and self-destructive Czech-narrow
mindedness claims the floor.)

(23) V prostředí plotů, dělících čar a nedůvěřivého či pohrdavého vztahu k

jakékoli jinakosti bývají ovšem takové vlastnosti jako laskavost, vlídnost,
nezištnost či bezelstná upřímnost předmětem tichého posměchu. Cynismu,
kariérismu, závisti, zbabělosti a zlobě—zvlášt’ jsou-li zahaleny do svatou-
škovského hávu—se v něm naopak daří. (1/1/99)
(In the milieu of fences, dividing lines, and suspicious or contemptuous
relations to any sort of otherness, of course, properties such as benevolence,
kindness, unselfishness, or sincere honesty are often the object of a silent rid-
icule. Cynicism, selfish career-mindedness, envy, cowardice, and malice—
especially if they are clad in a sanctimonious robe—on the contrary, do well
in it [this milieu].)
Compare these examples with Clinton’s third-person references. Clinton’s
speeches refer to concrete individuals in conjunction with their positive
accomplishments:
(24) Mr. Speaker, it was a powerful moment last November when you joined
Reverend Jesse Jackson and me in your home state of Illinois and committed
to working toward our common goal, by combining the best ideas from both
sides of the aisle. I want to thank you again and to tell you, Mr. Speaker, I
look forward to working with you. This is a worthy, joint endeavor. Thank
you. [Applause] (1/27/00)
In reporting sources of information, some referents are semianonymous but
nonetheless descriptive:
 Reading and Technology 107

(25) For example, researchers have identified genes . . . Researchers already

are using this new technique . . . Scientists are also working on an artificial
retina to help many blind people to see. (1/1/00)

Such devices create an impression that the speaker is working and consulting
with specialists. This is another way to present oneself as a co-player. The
process of self-presentation is therefore strikingly distinct in Havel’s speeches
compared to Clinton’s. The scarcity of references to specific individuals other
than the speaker tends to present Havel the president as the sole source of
modality and reliable information. The president can be viewed as reporting
to the potentially misinformed audience what is truly a democratic society.
Without considering the macro-level properties of the text, Havel’s approach
may seem puzzling to a reader who is accustomed to hearing political
speeches like Clinton’s in which the speaker presents not only himself but
also the audience and others as individuals who know what is best for the
country.

Reading Mori on the Micro Level

Mori’s speeches also seem to exhibit a set of unusual properties on
the sentence level. As mentioned above, Mori tends to refer to his contacts
with various groups of people rather than distinct individuals. His speech
strategies di√er from both Clinton’s and Havel’s in his use of humble and
honorific forms (indicated in parentheses); he not only takes the position
of a subordinate in relation to the communities (26) but also sometimes
assumes the role of a superior in relation to certain groups of people as
in (27):
(26) Konkai no samitto kaisai ni saisi, jimoto hukuoka, miyazaki, okinawa no
katagata, sosite zenkoku no minasama kara tadai no gosien, gojinryoku wo
itadakimasita. kokorokara orei moosiagemasu. (4/7/00)
Toward the hosting of the Summit Meeting, I (humbly) received (honor-
able) support and (honorable) help from the (respected) people of the local
Fukuoka, Miyazaki, and Okinawa and all (respected) people of the entire
country. I humbly express thanks from the bottom of my heart.

(27) Koomuin syokun ni taisite wa senpan sikoo sareta kokka koomuin

rinrihoo wo humae kooki no gensei to rinri no koojoo ni torikumuyoo
tuyoku motomemasu. (4/7/00)
Toward the public servants (who are my subordinates), I demand that they
strive for propriety in their actions and for an improvement in their ethics, in
line with the recently promulgated National Public O≈cial Moral Code.
108 Masako Ueda Fidler

The speaker thus indicates his position in a hierarchy in which he presents

himself as a superordinate to public servants and as a subordinate to ordinary
citizens.
Another salient feature of Mori’s speeches can be found in his references to
predecessors or ancestors (senjin) as a source of modality.
(28) Watasitati wa senjintati no ketui to doryoku ni omoi wo itasi nagara,
atarasii seiki no nippon . . . wo tukutte ikanakereba narimasen. (7/2/00)
(Ever mindful of the determination and e√orts of our predecessors, we must
build a nation for the new century.)

The speaker also positions himself as having been chosen by providence:

(29) Obutizensoori no kookeisya ni watasi ga erabareta koto wa tenmei da to
uketomete orimasu. (4/7/00)
(I [humbly] choose to view the fact that I have been chosen as a successor of
former Prime Minister Obuchi as an act of providence.)

Mori thus seems to be humbly accepting a leadership position assigned by

higher forces.
Mori’s texts may further catch the reader’s eye with their apparently poetic
and almost romantic visions of Japan’s future:
(30) watasi wa honnaikaku wo ‘‘nippon sinsei naikaku’’ to site, ‘‘ansin site
yume wo motte kuraseru kokka,’’ ‘‘kokoro no yutaka na utukusii kokka,’’
‘‘sekai kara sinrai sareru kokka,’’ sonoyoona kokka no jitugen wo mezasite
mairimasu. (4/7/00)
(I christen [lit., make] this administration the ‘‘Cabinet for the Rebirth of
Japan’’ and will [humbly] aim to realize ‘‘a nation of people who live in
security embracing our dreams for the future,’’ ‘‘a nation of beauty rich in
spirit,’’ and ‘‘a nation that engenders the trust of the world.’’

Linguistic devices such as politeness markers and ways of presenting him-

self and his political programs make Mori appear to be a humble and polite
public servant, at least on the surface.

A Second Look at Structural Properties and

Speech Strategies in Context
It is convenient to consider these apparently unusual linguistic patterns
as direct manifestations of cultural di√erences. One may even state at this
stage that we can learn to appreciate such cultural di√erences. We could
compare these features and create a linguistic or cultural typology. I would
 Reading and Technology 109

like to question, however, whether these approaches lead to cultivating un-

derstanding and appreciation of languages and cultures.
I shall look more closely at the texts, this time with attention to both the
micro-level and macro-level properties: how sentence-level properties inter-
act with discourse and social contexts (when the speeches are delivered, how
and where they are delivered, and the audience to whom they were deliv-
ered). I shall then reveal greater similarities between Mori and Clinton in
spite of di√erences on the micro level. Motivations for what appear to be
puzzling features can be explained after we consider Havel’s historical and
political experience.
As mentioned above, Mori’s speeches may give the impression that the
speaker is an unusually polite public servant when the text is analyzed with-
out attention to discourse-level properties. Examination of the structural
properties of the language used in the particular context shows, however, that
this is not entirely an accurate description.
True, as seen above, in Mori’s speeches humble forms abound. He empha-
sizes his dedication to his country. Note, however, that humble forms are on-
the-record (Brown and Levinson 1987, pp. 17–21) politeness markers. They
are nearly automatic in such speeches. When translated literally, these forms
may seem to contain excessive degrees of politeness, as in (26) and (27), but
they are semirequired components of contemporary politicians’ speeches.
More important, these forms compensate for the absence of explicit first-
person plural forms in speeches that would otherwise express solidarity with
the addressee. In other words, the politeness markers are used not only as a
norm but also for a political purpose: to engage the audience and win its sup-
port. For this reason, it is also necessary for the speaker to present himself as
holding all the branches of his government under his control; hence the use
of forms expressing the speaker’s superiority over the government o≈cials.
Another similarity between Clinton and Mori can be seen in the predicate
semantics associated with the first-person singular references. Clinton’s pred-
icates do not necessarily report actions in the sense of causing something to
materialize without failure, as in (1) and (2). Specific visions are being pro-
posed, but the speaker does not guarantee their realization. A similar type of
predicate is frequently found in Mori’s speeches: verbs emphasizing max-
imum e√ort and strong determination.
(31) Moteru tikara no kagiri wo tukusi, sinmei wo tosite kokusei ni tori-
kunde mairimasu. (4/7/00)
(I will [humbly] apply [lit., exhaust] my full strength and tackle the matters
of state, devoting [lit., risking] my body and life.)
110 Masako Ueda Fidler

(32) . . . korekara no nippon no tame ni toomen suru syokadai ni kenmei ni

torikumi . . . (7/28/00)
(. . .to channel all my e√orts into tackling . . . the challenges we face for the
sake of our future Japan)

These verbs could be interpreted as metaphorically reporting causality

(transferring his power into some project). They therefore may appear to
present the prime minister’s strong dedication. The verbs, however, leave the
causality between the speaker’s e√ort and the realization of his intended
projects opaque. Mori’s speeches create an image of a politician who is ac-
tively involved in his duties, but his predicates avoid guaranteeing that his
visions will materialize.
There are also similarities between Mori’s and Clinton’s texts in the way
their political programs are proposed. Clinton draws support for his pro-
grams from people other than himself: groups of experts—members of Con-
gress in (2) and (24), scientists as in (25), and valuers of the spirit of American
democratic values, as in (3). His political programs, in other words, are
presented as being based on consensus and on democratic principles that are
nearly indisputable in the American social context. Mori’s references to the
wisdom of his ancestors in (28) and divine forces in (29)—entities that auto-
matically deserve respect in the Japanese social context—justify his position
and his programs. Nominalization of Mori’s political visions in (30) blurs the
timing of processes (Fairclough 1989, p. 124) and helps them appear as ax-
ioms. This observation is consistent with other features of Mori’s texts. Mori
often embeds modal expressions in subordinate clauses that modify nouns;
this device results in an interpretation that the stated necessity and obligation
already are established facts. Modal expressions also occur in relative clauses
that modify nouns. Here, too, modality is not questioned but is presented as
an established value:

(33) Zaiseikoozoo kaikaku ga kanarazu jitugen sinakerebanaranai juuyoo-

kadai de arukoto wa ron wo matimasen. (4/7/00)
(There is no doubt whatsoever that fiscal structural reform is a matter of
utmost priority that must absolutely be achieved.)

Clinton’s and Mori’s speeches start with a premise on which everyone is

said to agree. Then concrete political plans based on this premise are pro-
posed. Each speaker presents the audience as a team player with the intention
of having his program approved. Realization of the plans, the degree to which
the plans reflect the premise, and the actual definition of the premise are left
ambiguous. In addition, the speaker does not need to take full responsibility
 Reading and Technology 111

for the premise because it results from commonly accepted values or tradi-
tions. It is then possible that the speaker will not be held entirely accountable
for the political program based on this premise.
Clearly, the speeches by Clinton and Mori, in spite of their apparent struc-
tural di√erences, use similar discourse strategies to promote political plans.
The present data set, in spite of its small size, indicates that a text must be
interpreted not only in terms of sentence-level properties (for example, ex-
pression of politeness) but also in terms of speech registers (for example,
political speech) using both internal and comparative approaches.
In contrast to the speeches of these two speakers, Havel’s do not contain
political programs. This is partially due to his political function as head of
state rather than as head of the executive branch. The absence of concrete
political programs and references to concrete achievements in the preceding
year, however, is also connected with what used to be contained in New Year’s
Addresses in socialist Czechoslovakia. Havel’s texts can be seen as reactions to
the texts by his predecessors, who presented positive accomplishments of the
socialist state, especially production of steel, wheat, and other food products
and future political programs such as five-year plans. This interpretation is
consistent with Havel’s own statement that he does not want to introduce
numbers because he thinks that the audience must be tired of hearing such
things in New Year’s Addresses. Thus, the apparently unusual style of Havel’s
political speeches is constructed on another layer of political speeches. This is
not surprising considering his sensitivity to how texts can be deformed and
made into utter nonsense, as shown in his play Vyrozumění (The Memoran-
dum, 1966). With still-vivid memories of a typical speech under the total-
itarian regime, the speaker intentionally takes the diametrically opposite
approach.
Unlike a typical socialist speechmaker, Havel strives to convince the au-
dience of the validity of his beliefs. His speeches, in other words, involve a
debate or a dialogue:
(34) Vím, jak to zní nepopulárně, ale nemohu si pomoct: nejvíc ublížíme
sami sobě, když se budeme starat jen sami o sebe. (1/1/00)
(I know how unpopular it sounds, but I cannot help telling you this: We
will hurt ourselves most if we care about nothing but ourselves.)
In order to provoke, persuade, and convince the audience, Havel tends to
present himself as the major source of authority—of modality and evalua-
tion. It is also important to modify the addressee’s potential misguided beliefs
by zooming in on their negative properties. Rhetorical questions may also be
used to challenge the addressee in this regard:
112 Masako Ueda Fidler

(35) Ano, kdo jiný je tvůrcem hodnot, než svobodný člověk? Ale cožpak je
člověk jen tímto? (1/1/97)
(True, who but a free human being is the creator of values? But is this all that
there is in humanity?)

Havel’s texts question rather than present concepts such as democracy and
freedom as axioms. In this style of argumentation, it is necessary to contrast
the speaker’s belief and the audience’s possible misguided belief. The speaker
needs to show that the latter would lead to an undesirable result. Since the
goal of his text is to present his opinion, the speaker takes responsibility for
his own assertions. Consequently, the source of modal expressions and rec-
ommendations is the speaker rather than some ostensibly agreed-on values
or axioms.
Thus, an apparently puzzling aspect of Havel’s texts becomes meaningful
when viewed in the context of Czech politics and history. Havel’s texts can
even be viewed as responding to the texts of professional politicians beyond
the Czech context. These observations suggest that a text requires consider-
ation of a long cultural-historical-social memory on which it may be con-
structed and a comparative perspective to see how the text may interact with
contemporary and possibly future texts in the same genre.

Teaching Reading and Use of Technology for Less Commonly

Taught Languages: Czech as an Example
The examples from three di√erent languages given above demonstrate
that text interpretation requires analysis on two levels: micro-level properties
and macro-level properties. Parsing of the morphosyntactic function of each
word and the relations between clauses within a sentence belong to the
former, analysis of the interaction between sentence-level properties and
discourse to the latter. Discourse includes identifying referents, analyzing the
relations among sentences and paragraphs, and most important, analyzing
the speech situation: who is speaking to whom on what type of occasion and
with what type of cultural, social and historical assumptions. As shown in the
analysis of Mori’s speeches, a cross-linguistic approach also helps sharpen
our understanding of a text. The final interpretation of forms and lexicon
largely depends on these parameters. As shown above, reading a text solely on
the micro level may yield potentially misguided interpretations unless ac-
companied by a reading on the macro level.
This issue is connected with the question of how a language teacher could
e√ectively use the increasingly accessible authentic materials on the Web. The
 Reading and Technology 113

analysis of texts above suggests that assigning a text from the Web merely
because it is authentic and teaching students how to parse it does not auto-
matically constitute reading of a text or understanding culture. Besides, most
authentic texts that are intellectually stimulating for college students, such as
news, articles on culture, and anecdotes, are not easily accessible to beginning
students of less commonly taught languages such as Czech; the language
requires a relatively large amount of time to master the basic mechanics of
grammar and a bulk of vocabulary that does not have many cognates in
English. Clearly, some type of materials are needed to serve as a bridge
between the student and authentic reading matter.

Electronic Reading Materials for Students of Multiple Levels

For Czech, materials that help students read independently have tradi-
tionally appeared as readers in a textbook format to be used above the first-
year level (for example, Heim et al. 1985). For languages such as Czech,
however, technology gives the Web much greater potential than the textbook
format. One advantage of the Web is the relative ease with which materials
may be updated. Publishers are usually reluctant to make changes in a text-
book unless there is a high demand for it in the market. It also takes time to
incorporate such changes into a textbook. On the Web, errors can be cor-
rected, vocabulary can be adjusted, and new materials can be added imme-
diately as the need arises at a relatively low cost.
The strength of Web technology, however, goes beyond such commercial
considerations. Its nested structure allows readers to access grammar infor-
mation and definitions of vocabulary terms in context while following the
storyline (Du√elmeyer 1984, p. 513); this feature frees up time for reading in
context and discussion of culture in the classroom. Unlike books, which tend
to be cluttered with footnotes, Web sites have annotations that are hidden
and do not distract the reader away from macro-level reading.
The HTML text also aids reading on both micro and macro levels for
students at various stages of language learning. In a paper format there is
no satisfactory way of creating multilevel material. Take, for example, the
basic issue of providing vocabulary commentaries: a short vocabulary list or
abbreviated grammar commentary makes the material less accessible to be-
ginners, whereas extensive annotations are psychologically intimidating for
them. Text on the Web can be in principle linked to as many vocabulary
glosses as needed for various groups of readers, enabling them to choose only
the type of information they need. E≈cient and large-scale language input,
especially exposure to language in context accompanied by many helping
114 Masako Ueda Fidler

hands in parsing and vocabulary, accelerates the reading process, thereby

allowing the instructor to introduce more advanced activities fairly early.
Furthermore, the text linked to the Web o√ers students an increasing sense
of contact with the outside world. Classroom teaching alone often limits
students to imaginary or artificial situations. Even with the presence of
props and other materials, the classroom is somewhat detached from the cul-
ture and people being studied. Information in the book format tends to be
quickly outdated. In contrast, if a text is linked to well-maintained Web sites,
students can easily access the most current information about various aspects
of Czech culture. Given specific tasks and specific sites that are appropriate
for their levels, students with various academic interests can explore infor-
mation actively. Intermediate- and advanced-level students will soon dis-
cover that Web pages in English do not o√er as much information about
Czech culture and realia as do those in Czech. If they are given carefully
selected assignments, students will find reading in Czech more ‘‘real’’ and
realize that certain types of information cannot be obtained without reading
in the target language. Discovery of new sites related to individual interests
keeps everyone excited about the country and about language learning and
leads to active discussion in the classroom.

Basic Components of Czech Reading Materials

With respect to specific problems in teaching Czech, there are several
components that may need to be included in materials on the Web. They are
being studied in our ComeniusWeb, an ongoing project that currently exists
as ‘‘Brown On-Line Czech Anthology’’ »http://www.language.brown.edu/
CZH/…. One preliminary component that may be self-evident but nonethe-
less significant is a section in English that discusses reading strategies for
students and instructors. The traditional approach to reading in Czech has
been based on parsing of individual sentences; the issue of combining both
micro- and macro-level reading has not been extensively addressed by in-
structors of Czech. Students who are in the process of learning inflectional
patterns tend to focus on the structural aspects of the language, and they are
likely to need instructions on how micro- and macro-level reading strategies
should mesh when they read a text.
Several other features may be incorporated to help accelerate students’ rate
of learning and reading on the micro level. Glossing of a text—parsing both
grammar and vocabulary—helps students at di√erent levels deal with the
mechanics of individual sentences. Students at di√erent levels of learning will
benefit from two types of vocabulary explanation: English translation of the
 Reading and Technology 115

item and a Czech paraphrase. Retention of sentence patterns, grammatical

properties, and lexicon can be enhanced by several other features: vocabulary
entries listing both the English equivalent and Czech paraphrase, sound files
for vocabulary entries and the text, paraphrasing exercises for stylistically
marked lexical items, exercises in which students search for lexical items
related to a specific theme, and grammar exercises that are related in con-
tent to the text. These exercises help increase knowledge of and structure of
the lexicon and help students become readers of new texts who are careful
with details.
Besides these features, which address micro-level reading, macro-level
components are indispensable. Attention to this level starts with selection of
texts. If the goal of reading is to incorporate macro-level components that are
maximally useful for reading other texts, teaching materials should reflect the
cultural ‘‘canon’’ in a language, representative texts that are known to an
educated native speaker. These texts tend to recur and are recycled not only in
literature but also in journalistic and political writings. The knowledge of
such texts assists students in grasping the author’s perspective and in under-
standing historical and cultural association that the author wishes to invoke
in new texts.
Reading material located on the Web has great potential for incorporation
of macro-level reading components. Links to the broader cultural context
(for example, skimming for gist, hypothesis testing, summarization) can be
placed in several parts of the text to allow beginning students to grasp the
main flow of discourse. These exercises help develop the habit of engaging
with the text, enabling students to contrast their expectations with the con-
tent of the text.
Links to information about the author, the text itself, and cultural annota-
tions to the text, including its social and historical context and how it is being
received by the current native audience, not only acquaint students with the
general nature of the text but also help students learn the insiders’ view of it.
The latter leads to discussions of di√erences between students’ interpreta-
tions and naive interpretations and also of changing interpretations by native
readers over time. These discussions can be combined with exercises aimed at
building salient, pragmatically and culturally appropriate discourse.
The links, which may be connected further to existing pages on the Web,
may also be structured so that students of di√erent language competencies
can access di√erent links to varying depths. Here, however, great care must be
taken to insure that the tasks are specified for particular levels and that they
are meaningful in terms of learning culture. For students who wish to pursue
their academic interest in Czech language and culture, the Web is also capable
116 Masako Ueda Fidler

of incorporating bibliographies and publications sites where students con-

tribute their own papers in Czech studies; electronic mentoring would also
be possible with Czech scholars who are scattered throughout the world.

Conclusions
In this chapter I have used speeches by three political leaders to show
the significance of both micro- and macro-level aspects of text interpretation.
In fact, the latter is crucial for understanding the functions of the former.
Misreading of texts may lead to misunderstandings that may have practical
and serious repercussions. I have also pointed out how materials on the Web
that combine both aspects could benefit learning of reading in less com-
monly taught languages such as Czech that require a relatively large amount
of time to reach proficiency. These materials will serve as a bridge between
the student and the authentic materials that are becoming increasing avail-
able on the Web. They could accelerate the development of reading abilities
of students at both the micro and the macro level and enhance the nature of
classroom interactions.

Sources
William J. Clinton, State of the Union Address (January 27, 2000)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpsrv/politics/special/states/docs/
sou00.htm
Václav Havel, New Year’s Addresses (January 1, 1994, 1995, 1997, 1998, 1999,
2000) http://www.hrad.cz/president/Havel/speeches/
Yoshiro Mori, Policy Speech to the 147th Session of the Diet (April 7, 2000)
http://www.kantei.go.jp/jp/souri/2000/0407syosin.html
Yoshiro Mori, Policy Speech to the 149th Session of the Diet (July 28, 2000)
http://www.kantei.go.jp/jp/souri/2000/0728syosin.html

References
Brown, P., and S. C. Levinson. (1987). Politeness: Some Universals in Language Use.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Chung, S., and A. Timberlake. (1990). Tense, Aspect, and Mood. In Language Typology
and Syntactic Description, edited by T. Shopen, pp. 202–58. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Du√elmeyer, F. A. (1984). The E√ect of Context Clues on the Vocabulary Test
 Reading and Technology 117

Performance of Word Dominant and Paragraph Dominant Readers. Journal of

Reading 27: 508–13.
Fairclough, N. (1989). Language and Power. London: Longman.
Givon, T. (1979). On Understanding Grammar. New York: Academic.
Havel, V. (1965). Vyrozumění: Hra o 12 obrazech. Prague: Dilia.
Heim, M., D. Worth, and Z. Meyerstein, eds. (1985). Readings in Czech. Columbus, Oh.:
Slavica.
 7

Experiential Learning and Collaborative

Reading: Literacy in the Space of Virtual
Encounters
silke von der emde and jeffrey
schneider

We induce (and seduce–perhaps even produce) the reader to join with us in

shapeful behavior, recognizing emerging contour within the disclosures of the
text. The contour is the figure of changing change, or how meaning is made.
—Michael Joyce, ‘‘MOO or Mistakenness’’

It is likely no mere accident that innovations in educational tech-

nologies have contributed significantly to the renewed interest in the cate-
gory of literacy in foreign language teaching and research. Although develop-
ing reading and writing skills has always been a hallmark of the foreign
language curriculum at colleges and universities, the concept of literacy o√ers
a new framework for thinking about reading and writing as intellectually
rich processes that extend beyond skills development. At the same time,
computer-assisted language learning (CALL) and, in particular, network-
based language teaching (NBLT)—where ‘‘human-to-human communica-
tion is the focus’’ (Warschauer and Kern 2000, p. 1)—have greatly expanded
what literacy means in a globalized information age in which reading and
writing—even communication itself—are increasingly mediated by com-
puters. Richard Kern, for instance, notes that computers not only ‘‘a√ect how
we read’’ (Kern 2000, p. 233) but, when used in the classroom, also add ‘‘layers
of complexity to an already complex process’’ (ibid., 224). This dual com-

118
 Experiential Learning 119

plexity—of literacy itself as well as of integrating technology into the language

learning process—suggests new, dynamic possibilities for reconceiving the
role of reading in the early sequences in the foreign language curriculum.
Indeed, the focus on literacy reflects a growing consensus that skills-based,
proficiency-oriented pedagogies have proved insu≈cient in preparing stu-
dents to make the transition from lower-level ‘‘language’’ courses to upper-
level ‘‘content’’ courses. Upper-level courses treat reading and writing not
only as integral practices for developing students’ critical thinking skills but
also as primary tools for the production and dissemination of knowledge.
Thus, realizing a literacy-oriented approach to foreign language learning
requires that we introduce into elementary and intermediate courses the
more complex theories and practices of reading featured in upper-level liter-
ary and cultural studies seminars.∞
The move to literacy in second language acquisition (SLA) research has
been instrumental in shifting the goals of intermediate foreign language
reading practices away from comprehension, information retrieval, or skills
development in the area of grammar and vocabulary to a new set of meaning-
ful interactions with text. Swa√ar, Arens, and Byrnes (1991), for instance, call
for an end to ‘‘sentence-level’’ reading instruction that inevitably encourages
simplistic ‘‘surface translation behavior’’ (p. 29) on the part of students.
Instead, they appeal for literacy standards that recognize foreign language
reading as an interactive and creative process that contributes to overall
foreign language learning but at the same time is not limited by the student’s
proficiency in the foreign language (p. 53). Kern’s concept of ‘‘active literacy’’
moves beyond a notion of normative literacy standards to define reading and
writing as ‘‘an apprenticeship in new social practices—an encounter with new
values, norms, and world views’’ (Kern 1998, p. 78). Though these models
o√er more dynamic conceptualizations of reading than older structuralist
and cognitive approaches, they inevitably limit the full range of possible
encounters with complex texts. All calls for literacy standards or ‘‘apprentice-
ship’’ implicitly run the risk of leaving the target culture intact as a stable,
unitary reference point or assigning to reading the task of completing the
circuit of communication with an idealized native speaker. Overall, the SLA-
based literacy movement seems to tie interactions with literary and nonliter-
ary texts too systematically to native-speaker-measured proficiency or func-
tional knowledge about the target culture. From the perspective of literary
and cultural studies, reading still comes up short in these models.
Thus, despite these important and expansive developments in foreign lan-
guage reading practices, there has been little attempt to integrate more de-
constructive and potentially liberating theories of reading from the fields of
120 Silke von der Emde and Je√rey Schneider

literary theory and cultural studies. Because literary and cultural studies
have changed over time and fractured into particular theoretical camps that
often have national characteristics—such as (German) aesthetics of recep-
tion, (French) structuralism and poststructuralism, and (Anglo-American)
reader-response criticism—and competing claims, it is di≈cult to enclose the
field within a unified historical narrative. Nevertheless, philosophers, literary
critics, and cultural studies scholars are unified in raising fundamental and
unsettling questions about all three entities involved in the reading process—
the author, the text, and the reader: What constitutes authorship? What is a
text? How do texts mean? What is the role of the reader in actualizing the
meaning of a text? How does the very structure of language as a system of
signs both expand and constrain interpretation? (For a helpful overview, see
Eagleton 1983 and Calinescu 1993.) Far from reaching any final conclusions,
theorists reject strictly communicative notions of reading and, instead, em-
phasize that reading is an open-ended and creative process involving essen-
tially indeterminate texts. Rather than leading to a definitive understanding
or comprehension of a ‘‘pre authored’’ and authoritative text, such notions
stress that meaning is created, first and foremost, in the process of reading,
or, to say it another way, it is the reader, not the author, who ‘‘constructs’’
the text under perusal. In fact, in postmodernist theories of reading the
boundaries between reading and writing become blurred. As Matei Cali-
nescu, following Roland Barthes, suggests, ‘‘creative reading—deep, medita-
tive reading—is after all a recognizable form of ‘production’ ’’ (1993, p. 140).
These kinds of insights have led a few SLA theorists, most prominently
Claire Kramsch, to argue for a di√erent model of reading in the foreign
language classroom. Claire Kramsch’s and Thomas Nolden’s concept of ‘‘op-
positional reading,’’ for instance, describes how fourth-semester students
can construct the text they are reading and thereby question its authority
(Kramsch and Nolden 1994). The radical potential for foreign language read-
ing emerges even more clearly in Kramsch’s notion of ‘‘the privilege of the
non-native speaker’’ (Kramsch 1997). By exposing the native speaker as a
class-based ‘‘fiction’’ that obfuscates real tensions within any language com-
munity, Kramsch problematizes comprehension as an objective criterion for
teaching and assessing reading and suggests instead that notions of pleasure
and self-actualization might be more important objectives for foreign lan-
guage reading—and language study more generally. Altogether, these new
initiatives regarding reading and literacy not only seek to reframe foreign
language learning as part of the larger intellectual mission of higher educa-
tion in this country but also work to enfranchise learners who have tradi-
 Experiential Learning 121

tionally been most disempowered by their linguistic skills and their un-
familiarity with the target culture.
Admittedly, such decentering notions of reading can easily overwhelm
language learners, who find the meaning of foreign language texts already too
indeterminate on the basis of their limited language skills. But, as Kramsch’s
concept of the privilege of the nonnative speaker foregrounds, the very lin-
guistic distance from a text can prove a boon as much as a hindrance. Thus,
although it is important to recognize that some degrees of comprehension
are not only possible but necessary and even desirable to promote exchange
and understanding between persons of di√erent cultures and di√erent lan-
guages, we may do our students a disservice when we confine elementary and
intermediate foreign language reading to comprehension or communica-
tion. If reading texts of a foreign culture primarily means learning the dis-
course conventions of that culture in order to facilitate smooth communica-
tion among speakers of di√erent cultures, as even the new Focus on Form
movement has tended to suggest (see Doughty and Williams 1998; Lee and
Valdman 2000), we stop short of giving our students the opportunity to
explore the creative tensions between ‘‘the textual and the social’’ (Kramsch,
A’Ness, and Lam 2000). And we miss the opportunity of allowing our stu-
dents to experiment with notions of authorship, fictionalization, and repre-
sentation—the very concepts that enable them to engage critically with the
target culture as well as their native culture and thereby to realize the larger,
self-reflective goals laid out by higher education. Thus, it is critical that we
not define the textual and the social in relatively flat terms, whereby the
textual seems entirely authorized and constrained by the social context in
which it is produced. By placing, among other things, equal emphasis on the
real and possible contexts and conditions in which such texts are received as
well as produced (including the language classroom itself ), literary and cul-
tural studies inevitably open up richer interpretive tensions, even for foreign
language learners. After all, the di√erences among pluralistic and competing
social contexts—whether they be defined as linguistic communities, time
periods, or class- or gender-based groups, for example—should prevent any
simple binaristic notion of the text-social or the text-context relationship.
In this chapter we outline a model for introducing low-intermediate lan-
guage learners to the complex modes of reading practiced in literary and
cultural studies. In addition to drawing on our training in these fields, this
model has emerged from our intensive classroom work with a German-
language MOO (‘‘MOOssiggang’’) over the past few years and our e√orts to
reflect critically on the role of technology in the foreign language classroom.≤
122 Silke von der Emde and Je√rey Schneider

A MOO (multi-user domain, object oriented) is an on-line text-mediated

virtual-reality space, where multiple users interact and communicate in a
‘‘room’’ and can move from ‘‘room’’ to ‘‘room.’’ Evolved from the Dungeons
and Dragons game software in the 1970s, the MOO has become what Kern
calls one of the ‘‘most novel environments for social interaction and collab-
orative learning on the Internet’’ (Kern 1998, p. 76). Elsewhere we have
explained general uses for MOOs in the language classroom, including how
we have used it to collaborate with native speakers at the University of Mün-
ster in Germany (von der Emde, Schneider, and Kötter 2001) and to trans-
form the low-intermediate language class into a cultural studies seminar
(Schneider and von der Emde 2000). In this essay, however, we would like to
focus on how the MOO recasts foreign language reading as a collaborative,
experiential, and circular enterprise. As Warschauer and Kern suggest, ‘‘new
technologies do not only serve the new teaching/learning paradigms, they
also help shape [them]’’ (2000, p. 12). Thus, though this application of the
MOO draws on important general principles of language learning pedagogy
as well as reading practices in literary studies, the result was less a series of
discrete units focused on reading than a semester-long approach that re-
shaped the classroom into a literacy community in which reading became
writing, writing became reading, and students began to create a German
language virtual culture that helped them reflect on the very process of
reading from their privileged position as foreign language readers. The read-
ings in this third-semester German course consisted of primary documents
from the first half of the twentieth century, including film excerpts, maps,
and short, thematic passages in German ranging from literary texts by Franz
Kafka, Irmgard Keun, and Else Lasker-Schüler to political and autobiograph-
ical texts by Oswald Spengler, Thomas Mann, and Rosa Luxemburg. The
verbal and visual texts were organized into general thematic units devoted to
space and identity and o√ered exposure to a particularly important historical
moment in German culture. We also sought to provide a series of collabora-
tive and experiential activities to help students become informed, indepen-
dent readers capable of sustained reflection on the reading process. To this
end, we drew on our increasingly expanding sense of what is possible in a
MOO: not only its capacity for synchronous computer-mediated communi-
cation (CMC) but also the rich asynchronous forms of writing in a MOO,
which open up powerful opportunities for reflecting on the process of read-
ing itself as a creative and playful process of (re)writing. As we shall point out,
the important spatial dimensions of the MOO allow for a unique circular and
circling visualization of the reading process itself: a sense of literacy in the
space of virtual encounters.
 Experiential Learning 123

Collaborative Reading
The MOO is an inherently collaborative space that radically expands
the possibilities for language learning. On the most obvious level, the syn-
chronous, text-based form of discussion in the MOO allows students to work
together in small groups with their classmates or in teams consisting of native
speakers or language learners at other colleges and universities. As studies of
CMC have shown, the on-line discussion format o√ers many advantages over
traditional face-to-face discussions: it reduces negative a√ective filters that
often accompany oral performance in the classroom, it dramatically in-
creases target language use and class participation, and it enables more so-
phisticated language use (see Beauvois 1992, 1994, 1997; Kern 1995). Yet com-
municating in the MOO does more than facilitate classroom discussions in
another medium. We want to suggest that the intensely student-centered
format of on-line group work initiates students into a process we call collab-
orative reading, in which the very act of reading—of actualizing the text—is
the result of teamwork and dialogic engagement with the text. This is not to
say that students do not develop their own individual interpretations—they
do that, too—but they begin to realize that reading is a social act as much as it
is a personal relationship with the text. As Kern explains, ‘‘A literacy-based
orientation to language teaching . . . means engaging learners in reading and
writing as acts of communication,’’ which leads students to ‘‘become aware of
the complex webs, rather than isolated strands, of meaning in human com-
munication’’ (Kern 2000, pp. 45–46). In the case of our classroom work in
the MOO, students used on-line discussions to collaborate on actualizing
texts. Since they worked among themselves with only suggestive, optional
questions from us as additional guidance, they also had the opportunity to
playfully experiment with ideas and try out di√erent readings of the text
with their peers in ways that generally exceed group work in a traditional
classroom.
This collaborative reading practice facilitated basic language learning at
the level of vocabulary development. But more important, it also promoted
richer, more contextualized forms of language learning, which resulted from
developing interpretations of texts within the act of communicating with
fellow learners. For instance, several important facets of collaborative reading
emerge in the following discussion of a short excerpt by Thomas Mann titled
‘‘Im Spiegel’’ (In the Mirror), an autobiographical text solicited for a maga-
zine in 1907:

cliffk sagt, ‘‘er spricht auch ueber seine Schule’’

mariel sagt, ‘‘und er hatte ein schimpfliche Vergangenheit’’
124 Silke von der Emde and Je√rey Schneider

portias sagt, ‘‘aber Cli√ hast du mir nicht erzahlt, dass er Schwul war?’’
cliffk sagt, ‘‘hmm . . . was heisst Schwul?’’
portias sagt, ‘‘gay’’
cliffk sagt, ‘‘ahh . . . das war nicht mich’’
portias sagt, ‘‘also, aber ist er?’’
cliffk sagt, ‘‘Ich vergesse, wer das gesagt hat’’
cliffk sagt, ‘‘ich weiss gar nicht’’
cliffk sagt, ‘‘Irgendwer hat gesagt, dass Hintergrundtext 1 das gesagt hat’’
portias sagt, ‘‘naja, es is nur interessant das er so viel ueber seine Frau
spricht’’
cliffk sagt, ‘‘Ja, stimmt . . . es ist interressant’’
portias sagt, ‘‘es ist wie er versucht immer noch sich zu beweisen’’
portias sagt, ‘‘weist du?’’
portias sagt, ‘‘was denkt darueber Marie?’’
portias sagt, ‘‘denkst*’’
mariel sagt, ‘‘War ‘Im Spiegel’ in einen Zeitschrift? Dann er wollte Leute zu
einen ‘normal’ Familie sehen.’’
portias sagt, ‘‘ja, genau’’
cliffk sagt, ‘‘das ist moeglich’’
portias sagt, ‘‘aber er wiederspricht ihm selbst, finde ich’’
mariel sagt, ‘‘Er spricht ueber seinen Gluecke. Ist das sarkastisch?’’
cliffk sagt, ‘‘hmm . . . ich glaube nicht’’
portias sagt, ‘‘ja, ich auch nicht’’
cliffk sagt, ‘‘Er schrieb ueber eine schoene Frau und Kinder’’
cliffk sagt, ‘‘und sein Komfort; herrlichsten Moebeln, Teppichen und
Kunstgemaelden’’
portias sagt, ‘‘hmmm’’
mariel sagt, ‘‘Ist er nicht in einen Gosse? Mit einen Frau, obwohl er ist
Schwul?’’
portias sagt, ‘‘er ist ganz Stolz’’

cliffk says, ‘‘he’s also speaking about his school’’

mariel says, ‘‘and he had a disgraceful past’’
portias says, ‘‘but, Cli√, didn’t you tell me he was gay (schwul)?’’
cliffk says, ‘‘hmm . . . what does ‘Schwul’ mean?’’
portias says, ‘‘gay’’
cliffk says, ‘‘ahh . . . that wasn’t me’’
portias says, ‘‘okay, but is he?’’
cliffk says, ‘‘I forget who said that’’
cliffk says, ‘‘I don’t know’’
cliffk says, ‘‘Someone said that the first background text said that’’
portias says, ‘‘okay, but it is just interesting that he speaks so much about
his wife’’
 Experiential Learning 125

cliffk says, ‘‘yeah, right . . . it is interesting’’

portias says, ‘‘it’s as if he’s still trying to prove himself ’’
portias says, ‘‘you know?’’
portias says, ‘‘what do you thinks (denkt) about it, Marie?’’
portias says, ‘‘think* (denkst)’’
mariel says, ‘‘Was ‘In the Mirror’ (Im Spiegel) in a magazine? Then he
wanted people to see a ‘normal’ family.’’
portias says, ‘‘yes, exactly’’
cliffk says, ‘‘that’s possible’’
portias says, ‘‘but he contradicts himself, I think’’
mariel says, ‘‘He talks about his happiness (Glueck). Is that sarcastic?’’
cliffk says, ‘‘hmm . . . I don’t think so’’
portias says, ‘‘yes, I also don’t think so’’
cliffk says, ‘‘He wrote about his beautiful wife and children’’
cliffk says, ‘‘and his comfort; marvellous furniture, carpets and paintings’’
portias says, ‘‘hmmm’’
mariel says, ‘‘But isn’t he in a gutter (Gosse)? With a wife, although he
is gay?’’
portias says, ‘‘he is quite proud’’
(Note: This and the following reproduced transcripts are excerpts from logs
made of student discussions in the MOO. All typographical and other errors
are original to the text. All students are cited throughout by pseudonyms.)
In approaching this short but di≈cult text, the students demonstrate some
basic reading skills that are critical to understanding the text: they return
regularly to the words in the text (schimpfliche Vergangenheit, schöne Frau,
Komfort, Gosse, for instance), they account for the genre of the text and make
inferences about its intended audience, and they activate the contextual
knowledge about the text and author contained in English-language back-
ground materials (the Hintergrundtexte) we made available in the MOO.≥ In
their call for teaching ‘‘critical competence’’ rather than merely ‘‘communica-
tive competence’’ in the intermediate language classroom, Jörg Roche and
Mark Webber argue that ‘‘instruction must give students the possibility to
work on complex topics even with their limited linguistic means of expres-
sion’’ (1995, p. 14). It is our experience that even in the face of periodic
frustration at trying to convey complex thoughts about di≈cult texts in
German, most students enjoy the challenge and even feel liberated and moti-
vated by the focus on ideas. Despite their own grammatical problems in this
written ‘‘oral discourse,’’ the students generally understand each other, as
evidenced in their responses: ‘‘ja, genau’’ (yes, exactly), ‘‘das ist moeglich’’
(that’s possible), and ‘‘ich glaube nicht’’ (I don’t think so). When communi-
cation problems do arise, they give each other important feedback (Cli√ ’s
126 Silke von der Emde and Je√rey Schneider

request for the meaning of the word schwul, for example). More important,
however, the discussion demonstrates that all three students have a basic
understanding of the text, in which Thomas Mann discusses his attainment
of an ideal bourgeois existence—a beautiful wife, a comfortable home, and
professional success—in light of his dismal performance as a student and his
teachers’ dire predictions for his future.
Although the students exhibit good comprehension at the sentence level,
they nevertheless raise important questions—and even disagree—about what
the text means. Portia, for instance, wonders why Thomas Mann writes so
much about his wife if he is supposed to be gay. Marie and Cli√ disagree about
whether Thomas Mann is actually happy in his bourgeois married existence.
As all three realize, the two questions are intimately related and form the crux
of their collaborative attempt to actualize the text for themselves. And the
results are rather impressive. Although Cli√ is quite content to take Mann’s
word choice at face value, Marie provides the key insight into vocabulary
when she realizes that words such as schimpfliche Vergangenheit (disgraceful
past) are less important for what they mean literally than for how they signify
irony and sarcasm. Portia’s focus on Mann’s reputed homosexuality also
seems to lead to an understanding of the dissimulation required for a married
homosexual who might need to compensate for this ‘‘deficit’’ publicly—as
Portia says, ‘‘sich beweisen’’ (to prove oneself ). Marie connects the text’s
publication with Mann’s public play with a private secret: ‘‘Dann er wollte
Leute zu einen ‘normal’ Familie sehen’’ (Then he wanted people to see a
‘‘normal’’ family). At several points in the discussion, each e√ort to develop
an interpretation—first Portia’s and then Marie’s—encounters resistance, in
the form of either disagreement or missing enthusiasm from the others. But
such resistance only spurs on the proponents to clarify their points and
convince their partners. In the end, Marie’s conclusion—that Mann’s mar-
riage represents the real unhappy ‘‘Gosse’’ (gutter) to which Mann’s bad
grades were supposed to lead him—represents a sophisticated and immensely
satisfying reading. At one level, Marie’s interpretation cannot be seen in terms
of communication or some notion of comprehension, since it can never be
traced conclusively back to the author’s intentions and, in fact, might even be
rejected by Mann himself. On another level, Marie’s use of Mann’s word
‘‘Gosse’’ in her counterreading represents the type of textual production that
Barthes advocates, since she is in fact rewriting Mann’s text by using his
original words to actualize her own reading of the passage. That move adds an
entirely new layer of irony on top of Mann’s own.
Collaborative reading experiences like this one point toward the possibility
of using reading to reorganize language learning itself. In this example, it gives
someone like Marie, whose linguistic skills are much weaker than those of her
 Experiential Learning 127

two partners, not only a chance to contribute equally in the class but also a
chance to reap self-actualizing, intellectual rewards in the very process of
learning the language. The reconceptualization of reading within a collabora-
tive framework shifted the value of language learning for other students in the
class, too, even for something as fundamental as vocabulary building. For
instance, in one of the regular self-evaluations that students completed in
English at the end of each unit, one student, Daniel, acknowledged for himself
the importance of vocabulary development for engaging with the complex
texts we were reading: ‘‘Through readings of the authors like Rosa Luxemburg
and Franz Kafka, it became lucid at least to myself that I lacked a decent
amount of vocabulary needed to understand their works.’’ But he went on to
reframe the issue of vocabulary within the moment of collaboration with his
fellow students, when, he wrote, ‘‘I was looking for vocabulary: words and
ideas that I wanted to express but couldn’t because I lacked some important
vocabulary. This process made me develop my goals of learning a larger
vocabulary, especially on my own, and put emphasis on this part of my
studies.’’ This student’s understanding of vocabulary in both situations is
subtly but distinctly di√erent. Daniel characterizes the vocabulary he was
missing for the comprehension of the readings as a ‘‘decent amount,’’ a matter
of quantity, and the kind of vocabulary he needed to express his ideas about
the texts to others as ‘‘important,’’ a matter of quality. Although reading
authentic German texts builds vocabulary as an integral part of language
learning, it is the moment of collaborative interpretation that personalizes the
significance of vocabulary as the very basis for participation in a literacy
community—even if that community consists of other language learners
rather than native speakers. Reading does not, of course, naturally help stu-
dents build vocabulary. As Susanne Rott argues, ‘‘describing incidental vocab-
ulary gain as a ‘by-product’ of reading really does not capture the range of
cognitive processes involved in meaning assignment and word learning’’
(2000, p. 275). Her study, however, examines only individual students’ local,
global, and word-inferencing strategies through think-aloud processes and
does not assess the potential impact students’ reading rich, open texts in order
to jointly interpret their meaning rather than merely comprehend them as
information. As Daniel’s reflection indicates, the motivation of students to
learn vocabulary increases when the stakes of conveying ideas are high.

Experiential Reading
Synchronous discussions are not the only or the most interesting use of
the MOO to promote literacy. Thus, rather than limit students to straight-
forward discussions of texts, images, and films from the first half of the
128 Silke von der Emde and Je√rey Schneider

twentieth century that we were using to study space and identity, we also
devoted considerable time to working within the space of the MOO in other
ways, including role plays and writing and reading activities that contribute
directly to the expansion of MOOssiggang’s German-language virtual cul-
ture. Over the course of the semester, for instance, several assignments asked
students to produce and analyze virtual identities, notes, letters, rooms,
and other objects. In the MOO, all objects consist essentially of text and
hence provide excellent opportunities for writing and reading. Moreover,
because the MOO is a public space and easily makes student texts available
not only to teachers but also to fellow students, it expands the audience—
and thus raises the stakes—for student writing. On a pedagogical-political
level, this ‘‘creative’’ writing runs parallel to the creative texts they are read-
ing and consequently builds a bridge between authors such as Kafka and
Luxemburg and the foreign language learners who read them. Indeed, since
student writing in the MOO is a form of cultural production itself, it answers
Russell Berman’s call to ‘‘envision a strategy designed to elicit active pro-
ducers who engage in a culture rather than merely receive it’’ (Berman
1994, p. 10). As Claire Kramsch and Thomas Nolden have pointed out, how-
ever, this engagement only occurs when students have the opportunity to
value their own writing by subjecting it to the same kinds of cultural analyses
that are practiced in the classroom on published writing by native speakers
(Kramsch and Nolden 1994). Interpreting student writing in the MOO di√ers
in quality from engagement with other forms of disseminated student writ-
ing, including writing on the Web. As Michael Joyce argues, MOO rooms and
their objects have an experiential dimension to them that opens up the realm
of reading. Because asynchronous writing in the MOO becomes the setting
for synchronous communication, texts such as ‘‘rooms mean to be both the
expression and occasion of their interactions. The room is what you read
and where you write (sometimes writing what you read and where you write
the next time)’’ (Joyce 2000, p. 42). Although Joyce is referring explicitly
to room descriptions, his overall argument about the fundamental inter-
action between synchronous and asynchronous forms of writing in the MOO
is more complex, since his point refuses any simple or stable distinction
between these forms of writing or, for that matter, between reading and writ-
ing. The theoretical leverage of erasing those distinctions foregrounds the
rich experiential dimension of reading and interacting in the MOO. Thus, if
the MOO encourages a ‘‘readerly writing,’’ then it also calls for ‘‘writerly
reading’’ practices, something we sought to emphasize in the next series of
activities.
Creating personal rooms in the MOO was one of the first writing assign-
ments in the semester and came after students had read only a few texts. But
 Experiential Learning 129

once the rooms were completed, they became the occasion for several kinds
of experiential reading assignments. Although some rooms seem more ex-
pansive and elaborate than others, it is possible to demonstrate the experien-
tial nature of MOO writing and reading with a fairly short and straightfor-
ward one, such as Nora’s room, which we actually used as our main example
in a class session devoted to reflecting on the informal encounters students
had when they initially visited each other’s rooms. Nora’s room contains a
graphic of the band Radiohead followed by this text:
Noras Zimmer ist ein wundervoll Platzt. In diesem Zimmer spielt die Band
Radiohead immer. Nicht die CDs, aber DIE BAND!!! Nora hat ihnen ent-
fuert, so sie muessen nur fuer Nora spielen. Alle von Radioheads Musik-
ausruestung liegt in diesem Zimmer. Nun kann jeden Tag ein tolles Musik-
konzert sein! Die Zimmer ist eine kliene blaue Raum mit einem Bett, einem
Computer, keiner Stereoanlage (wer brauch eine Stereo, wenn man hat
Radiohead?), und vielen Sofas fuer nur gute/n Freundinen und Freunden.

(Nora’s room is a wonderful place. In this room, the band Radiohead is

always playing. Not the CD’s, but THE BAND!!!! Nora has kidnapped them,
so they have to play only for her. All of Radiohead’s music equipment is lying
in this room. Now there can be a great concert every day! The room is a small
blue room with a bed, a computer, no stereo system (who needs a stereo,
when you have Radiohead?), and many sofas for only good friends.)

Of course, though we work with students on developing basic writing skills,

we used this example to focus on student writing as an opportunity for
reading. Nora’s room description contains some grammatical errors, but her
fellow students had little problem comprehending the text. And although the
description may strike some as a little naïve, it actually provoked a range of
responses in our class discussion. For instance, one student observed that
only close friends seem to be welcome here and that there is not any space for
others. This student, who did not know Nora very well, felt left out. We also
discussed how Nora’s explicit insistence that she and her friends are hearing
live (rather than recorded) music from her favorite band uses the on-line
environment to express a wish for presence and authentic experience that
would surpass some of the experiences in her CD-mediated world.
In addition to this general class discussion focused on reading, we used two
activities—one explicitly collaborative and one of a more formal nature—to
structure and extend the experiential reading opportunities a√orded by these
student texts in the MOO. In the collaborative assignment, we asked students
to respond to each other’s rooms by creating a house-warming gift and
explaining it in a letter to the room’s owner in terms of the room. Nora’s
room, for instance, elicited the following texts from Daniel:
130 Silke von der Emde and Je√rey Schneider

Geschenk fuer Nora. Mein Geschenk fuer Nora ist eine Buehne fuer Radio-
head. Ich gebe sie diese Geschenk, denn sie die Gruppre Radiohead in ihrem
Zimmer hat. Aber wo wird die Gruppe spielen? Jetzt kann die Gruppe an der
Buehne spielen. Jetzt geht es sehr gut bei der Gruppe und Radiohead wird
gluecklich sein. Die Gruppe wird besser spielen, wenn sie sehr gluecklich mit
dem Zimmer ist. Ob die Personnen von Radiohead gluecklich sind, werden
sie nie den Beruf verlassen.

(My gift for Nora is a stage for Radiohead. I am giving her this gift because
she has the group Radiohead in her room. But where will the group play?
Now the group can play on her stage. Now it will be very good for the group,
and Radiohead will be happy. The group will play better if they are happy
with the room. Whether [sic] the persons of Radiohead are happy, they will
never leave their career.)

Liebe Nora, ich habe dein Zimmer sehr gern. Ich will dass du Radiohead auch
gern hat. Ich habe gern das Quotation ‘‘Es ist leicht ungluecklich zu sein, aber
es ist besser gluecklich zu sein.’’ Es ist von einem Lied. Ich finde es toll, dass
Radiohead live in deinem Zimmer spielen. Ich mochte in deinem Zimmer
immer sein! Vielleicht kann ich an deinem Sofas in deim Raum sein. Aber
ich denke, dass su ein Stereo noch haben musst. Andere Gruppen sind auch
sehr gut. So macht Spass mit deiner Gruppe Radiohead in deinem Zimmer.
— Daniel

(Dear Nora, I like your room a lot. I want you to like Radiohead very much. I
like the quotation ‘‘It is easy to be unhappy, but better to be happy.’’ It is from
a song. I think it’s great that Radiohead plays live in your room. I would like
to always be in your room! Perhaps I can be at your sofas in the room. But I
think that you also have to have a stereo still. Other groups are also very good.
So, have fun with your group Radiohead in your room!—Daniel)

Daniel’s gift and letter represent a reading of the room that engages with
Nora’s text on several levels. On one level, it a≈rms the value of the space she
created by providing an object designed to secure its meaning and existence,
since, as Daniel theorizes, if the players feel comfortable, they will not only
play better but also want to stay in Nora’s room. On a second level, however,
his gift also engages critically with Nora’s text. Rather than succumbing to her
fantasy of presence and self-indulgence in the music, Daniel’s reasons for the
stage gently push Nora to think beyond her own pleasures and take her inhab-
itants’ comfort into account. In a sense, Daniel is suggesting that Nora’s wish
for presence and intimacy with others in the MOO (including Radiohead)
must be carried through by a willingness to deal with the messy details of what
 Experiential Learning 131

that presence implies: consideration and, potentially, accommodation of oth-

ers and their needs. Finally, the sentence in his letter asking whether he can sit
on her for-friends-only couch signals his amicable intentions by stressing the
personal bond they share as fans of Radiohead. Although Daniel’s texts are
informal, indirect, and even implicit readings of Nora’s room, they demon-
strate that careful peer engagement with student writing can and should
initiate new texts that themselves call for new readings.
For the formal assignment, students were expected to o√er an explicit
interpretation of a MOO room produced by a student at another college.
Modeled on our class discussion of Nora’s room, these interpretations fo-
cused not only on the content of the rooms but also on the ways that the texts
constructed the reader and related to the discourse conventions of the MOO.
Brady’s experience of Stefan’s room produced the following sophisticated
reading, which refers explicitly to the experience of being in the space:

Interpretation von Stefans Gruft. In seinem Zimmer erschaeft Stefan sehr

wirksam eine dunkle, einschuechternde Laune. Seine Beschreibungen und
der Gebrauch von Ansprache des Lesers macht das Zimmer sehr lebens-
wahr—man fuehlt, wie er echt in dem Zimmer steht. Das ist aber nicht
unbedingt gut! Das Zimmer macht einen sehr aengstlich unruhig, es ist
furchtbar geheimnisvoll. Die Name des Zimmers, Stefans Gruft, ist sehbst
schrecklich, und der Rest des Texts folgt aehnlich. Anscheinend hat Stefan
Lust, Leute zu erschrecken! Ich habe mich gewuendert, ob Stefan echt so
dunkel wie sein Zimmer ist oder ob er das Zimmer als ein Witz gemacht hat.
Die Beschreibung des Zimmers hoert sich sehr an, als ob es in ‘Dungeons &
Dragens’ (ein Rollenspiel) pasen wuerde, so habe ich gedacht, dass vielleicht
Stefan das gern hat. Dann muss er nicht echt selbst duester sein, aber darf er
noch solche Sachen gern haben. Ich wuensche, dass ich Stefan im MOO
sprechen koennte, weil ich mehr wissen will.

(Interpretation of Stefan’s Tomb. In his room Stefan very e√ectively creates a

dark, intimidating mood. His description and use of addressing the reader
makes the room very true-to-life—you feel like you are in a real room. But
that is not necessarily good! The room makes you very afraid and uneasy; it is
very mysterious. Even the name of the room, Stefan’s tomb, is horrible, and
the rest of the text follows similarly. Apparently, Stefan delights in scaring
people! I wondered whether Stefan is really so dark as his room or whether he
made the room as a joke. The description of the room sounds as if it would fit
in ‘‘Dungeons & Dragons,’’ so I thought that perhaps Stefan likes that. But
then he himself doesn’t have to be really dark and forbidding, but he may like
such things. I wish that I could speak with Stefan in the MOO because I want
to know more!)
132 Silke von der Emde and Je√rey Schneider

Often, MOO room descriptions begin with the phrase ‘‘you see’’ as a strategy
of inserting the reader into the text itself. Although typically this convention
of addressing the reader underlines forms of community in the MOO, Brady
notices in this case a kind of aggressive tone in Stefan’s e√orts to address the
reader directly. Perhaps because of the imaginative setting of this and other
student rooms in the MOO, Brady also recognizes that texts are not neces-
sarily autobiographical and that readers need to be careful about inferring
things about the author from the text in a direct way. She understands that
authors can play with identity through language, particularly in the MOO,
which, as she mentions, is an ideal environment for role-playing. Despite the
formal nature of the assignment, however, Brady’s interpretation does not
signal the end of her engagement with the text. Rather than containing her
encounter within her own written response, she instead expresses the wish to
follow up her reading with a conversation with the author, who would not
only supply her with feedback on her own impressions but also potentially
answer other questions generated by Stefan’s text. Because these interpreta-
tions were read by the room’s owner (students placed them in the rooms they
were interpreting) as well as by the instructors, such writerly readings, which
of course are themselves texts, respond to the writer’s invitation to ‘‘join in
shapeful behavior’’ (Joyce’s phrase) with an implicit invitation back to the
author.
Indeed, Brady’s desire for a conversation reminds us that synchronous
communication in the MOO is experiential as well as collaborative. The
MOO o√ers space to assume a new identity—whether by choosing a new
name or gender or by living out a di√erent personality (either an aspect of
the user’s own or an entirely new one that is marked by his or her real name).
As Sherry Turkle suggests, the MOO—like the Internet more generally—‘‘has
become a significant social laboratory for experimenting with the construc-
tions and reconstructions of self that characterize postmodern life. In its
virtual reality, we self-fashion and self-create’’ (Turkle 1995, p. 180). We de-
cided to tap the power of role-playing for enriching the reading experience
and to examine the complex connection between identity and textual repre-
sentation. We assigned students specific roles (either authors or characters
from the texts we had read), which they were then asked to prepare ahead of
time by rereading the appropriate text or texts. The fact that students did not
know who was playing the other roles when they entered the MOO increased
the authenticity of the experience. The assignment for the role play was to
develop a concept for a German MOO museum devoted to the first half of
the twentieth century. Thus, the students had to argue for their author or
character from within that role, and they had to confront other authors and
 Experiential Learning 133

characters and their goals and intentions. Designed as an open-ended, task-

based activity, the role play produced a variety of results, with some groups
working out a solution and others failing to reach consensus. More impor-
tant than the specific group results were the implications for reading, which,
as Calinescu notes, is inherently performative in an analogous way to role-
playing in the MOO:
To read a literary work is to perform in several senses of the word. It is,
first, to perform a role—the role of the reader as ‘‘scripted’’ in the text. . . . To
read is, second, to perform in one’s own mind the roles of major characters in
a work of fiction—to become something of an actor who switches roles in an
extended mental solo performance. But in a third sense, to read is also a kind
of mental stage directing, which includes, aside from coaching the fictive
actors, designing the sets, selecting the costumes, and visualizing such expres-
sive details as gestures, movements, and faces. To read is, in other words, to
give voice, articulation, and shape to the text’s silent language, to fill out its
‘‘spots of indeterminacy’’ (Ingarden), to give meaning and life to the printed
page in one’s imagination. (1993, p. 275)

In a sense, then, the act of role-playing in the MOO rehearsed and even
literalized—since role-playing in the MOO uses written dialogues—for the
students the very dimensions of play present in any act of reading.
If reading is a form of performance, it is not surprising that acting it out in
a role play with others who have read the same texts produced important
insights for our students. In theories of experiential learning, however, expe-
rience is never su≈cient to guarantee the full measure of learning, since, as
Viljo Kohonen explains, ‘‘only experience that is reflected upon seriously will
yield its full measure of learning’’ (Kohonen 1992, p. 17). Thus, we followed
up the role play with an assignment asking students to reflect on the activity
by reading their own role play log plus the logs of two other groups and
discussing them in a subsequent session with the other members of their role
play group. These follow-up discussions suggest that the experience of play-
ing an author or character produced new insights into the texts as well as
thoughtful reflections on reading:
barbaram sagt, ‘‘ich habe die Autor/Innen von dieser Zeit mehr interessant
gefunden’’
barbaram sagt, ‘‘Lucy, kannst du noch mal erklaeren, was du meinst? ich bin
nicht sicher . . .’’
barbaram sagt, ‘‘meinst du Frauen?’’
robertb sagt, ‘‘Ich habe gelernt, dass alle diese Leute traurire Leben haetten’’
lucyk sagt, ‘‘Ich sagte dass Kafka homisexual war. Das meint nicht dass
Freuen ihn verwirr.’’
134 Silke von der Emde and Je√rey Schneider

barbaram sagt, ‘‘ja, Robert, du hast genau recht’’

thomasb sagt, ‘‘Ja, jetzt die autors gefallt mir besser.’’
thomasb sagt, ‘‘Ich verstehe die Lebens der Autors besser.’’
lucyk sagt, ‘‘ja’’
barbaram sagt, ‘‘jetzt will ich auch etwas mehr von jeder lesen’’
barbaram sagt, ‘‘es war schoen, dass wir alle uns gut vorbereiten haben . . .’’
robertb sagt, ‘‘das stimmt, Thomas’’
thomasb sagt, ‘‘Ja Barbara, ich bin einverstanden.’’
barbaram sagt, ‘‘damit haben wir die Moeglichkeit alle die Autor/Innen
besser zu verstehen’’
barbaram sagt, ‘‘es hat viel Spass gemacht’’

(barbaram says, ‘‘I found the authors from this time period more interest-
ing’’
barbaram says ‘‘Lucy, can you explain again what you mean? I’m not sure
(what you meant) . . .’’
barbaram says, ‘‘do you mean women?’’
robertb says, ‘‘I learned that all these people had sad lives’’
lucyk says, ‘‘I said that Kafka was homosexual. That doesn’t mean that
women confused him’’
barbaram says, ‘‘yes, Robert, you are exactly right’’
thomasb says, ‘‘Yes, now I like the authors more.’’
thomasb says, ‘‘I understand the lives of the authors better.’’
lucyk says, ‘‘yes’’
barbaram says, ‘‘now I want to read more by each (author)’’
barbaram says, ‘‘it was nice that we were all prepared well (for the role
play) . . .’’
robertb says, ‘‘you’re right, Thomas’’
thomasb says, ‘‘Yes, Barbara, I agree with you.’’
barbaram says, ‘‘thus we had the possibility to understand all the authors
better’’
barbaram says, ‘‘it was a lot of fun’’)
After the initial frustration that students often experienced in reading and
discussing these di≈cult German primary texts the first time around in the
semester, it is no surprise that they enthusiastically respond to what they
perceive as unadulterated play in this activity: ‘‘es hat viel Spass gemacht’’ (it
was a lot of fun). It is important that the dimension of fun in role-playing
broke down the rigid dichotomy between work and play that often informs
the experience of reading in college, especially in the lower levels of the
foreign languages, when students tend to read more slowly and less con-
fidently. But these students also testify that the activity of playing these au-
thors and characters gave them new ‘‘knowledge’’ about the authors. Al-
 Experiential Learning 135

though Lucy’s claim that Kafka was homosexual might be hotly debated and
is most likely incorrect, more than anything else, it continues the class’s
earlier e√orts to connect the enigmatic irony of Mann’s text with his reputed
homosexuality and signals her attempt to make sense of the enigmatic quality
of Kafka’s text in terms of her awareness of his problematic relationship with
women. (These student attempts, of course, follow a long historical tradi-
tion. Eve Sedgwick [1990], for instance, has famously argued that textual
and narrative secrets become linked to homosexuality in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries.) In distinction to Lucy’s focus on Kafka, however, Bar-
bara, Thomas, and Robert all refer to authors in the plural. Indeed, the
insights into the role play seem to stem as much from the collaborative
dimensions of the role play as from preparing and playing the specific indi-
vidual roles, which, as Barbara concludes, was well done. The reference to
authors in the plural suggests that the interaction between all the roles moved
students’ understanding from the specific texts they had reread in prepara-
tion for the role play to the intertextual connections that emerged through
that interaction. Although Robert saw, and Barbara confirmed, a common
sadness in their lives, the satisfaction of that insight—perhaps strengthened
by the identification from assuming their roles—also increased their interest
in reading more texts by all the authors.

Circular Reading
Whether through the dimensions of collaborative or experiential read-
ing, our activities in the MOO encouraged students to return again and again
to the course readings. The result was the students’ growing awareness of the
inexhaustibility of complex texts—as a result of the play of language or of the
constant emergence of new intertextual contexts for understanding. Our
final assignment of the semester sought once again to exploit the dynamic
sense of space in the MOO, not only to induce students to return again to the
text but also to help them reflect on reading and rereading as diachronic and
synchronic processes. Modern theories of reading often assign the initial
reading of a text a temporal dimension, while in rereading the expanded
sense of a text assumes the spatial metaphors of landscape and architecture
(Calinescu 1993, pp. 17–18). Although an absolute distinction does not hold
up under scrutiny, ‘‘in the world of (re)reading, the chronological-historical
flow of phenomenal time actually is reversed insofar as we recognize the
essential circularity of citation’’ (ibid., p. 53). The MOO, which is organized
on an architectural metaphor of rooms and exits, provides an excellent me-
dium for exploring and representing such a circular experience of reading,
136 Silke von der Emde and Je√rey Schneider

especially since rooms can be connected to each other in ways that are not
tied to a unidirectional (chronological) sense of time. The final activity of the
course consisted of having students build exits from their rooms to five or
more texts they had read in the course and then explain their choices in an
essay that would also be available as a note in their room. Students were free
to choose either student rooms (made by other Vassar students or by students
at our partner college) or the individual rooms that the instructors had
created for each author or topic. By linking their room to other rooms,
students represented their own personal and intellectual relationships with
other texts. But the activity also concretized for students the intertextual
reading process by o√ering a visual representation through the architectural
metaphor of the MOO. Indeed, it established a web of intertextuality across
the entire class, since anyone in the MOO could follow a link to another
room, which could then lead to additional texts and links in ways that might
create circular patterns.
As the following student essay by Lucy demonstrates, the students’ expla-
nations of their exits to other rooms reveal a series of intertextual connec-
tions on a number of di√erent intellectual and personal levels:
Ich habe eine Auesgange zu Weltflucht gebaut, weil das Gedicht viele inter-
essanten Ideen enthält. Ich mag Gedichten und denke dass es staunlich ist,
wenn man alle Interpretationen hoeren. Als meine Gruppe in der MOO
ueber das Gedicht spreochen hat, waren die Ideen von anderen Leute zu mir
neu. Ich dachte, dass das Gedicht euber Alter und Tod sprecht, sondern
andere Leute dachten, dass es sprecht, wie eine Gesellschaft eine Person
ersticken kann.
Ich habe eine Auesgange zu Noras Zimmer gemacht. Noras Zimmer
sprecht ueber das Band Radiohead. Radiohead ist mein beliebtes Band und
sie passen in dem Weimar Republik hinein, weil sie ueber Gesellschaft in den
Liedern sprechen. Alle Autoren in dem Weimar Republik kritisieren Gesell-
schaft und Radiohead kritisert Technologie in eueren Gesellschaft.
Ich habe ein Tunnel zu Kafka gemacht. Kafka ist ein wunderbarer Autor. In
‘‘Der Bau,’’ hat er eine Metapher fuer sein Leben gemacht. Die Text wie ein
Raetsel ist. Die Text ist spass zu lesen, weil Kafka die Bedeutung versteckt. Ich
moechte mehr Kafka lesen. Wenn ich habe gelernt, dass Kafka die Maulwurf
war, wollte ich mehr Kafka lesen.
Ich habe Irmgard (Keun) fuer mein Rollenspiel gespielt, und ich denke
jetzt, dass sie wichtig zu mir ist. Dies ist der Grund, warum ich eine Aus-
gaenge zu ihr gemacht habe. Vielleicht, weil sie nicht so bekannt wie Kafka,
Mann, oder Lusemburg ist, ist es gut eine Auesgange zu Irmgard zu machen.
Obwohl sie nicht so starke Meinungen wie Rosa Luxemburg hat, ist sie auch
faszinierend.
 Experiential Learning 137

Ich habe eine Ausgange zu Stefans Zimmer gebaut. Ich habe es inter-
pretiert und ihm ein Geschenk gegeben. Seine Autobiographie enthalt viele
Einblicken in Leben, die mich uber meine Kindheit zu reflektieren veran-
lassen. Stefans Leben is dem Lebens der Autoren aehnlich. Stefan und die
Autoren haben in Laaendern mit politischen Unruhen gewohnt. Thomas
Mann, Irmgard Keun, und Rosa Luxemburg erlebten die Nazis, waehrend
Stefan eine kommunisitsche Regierung erlebte.

I built exits to ‘‘Weltflucht’’ [‘‘World Flight’’ by Else Lasker-Schüler] be-

cause the poem contains many interesting ideas. I like poetry and think that it
is amazing when you hear all the di√erent intepretations. When my group in
the MOO spoke about the poem, many of the ideas of other people were new
to me. I thought that the poem spoke about aging and death, but other
people thought that it spoke about how a society can su√ocate a person.
I also made an exit to Nora’s room. Nora’s room talks about the band
Radiohead. Radiohead is my favorite band and they fit in with the Weimar
Republic because they talk about society in their songs. All the authors in the
Weimar Republic criticize society and Radiohead criticizes technology in
your society.
I also made a tunnel to Kakfa[’s room]. Kafka is a wonderful author. In
‘‘Der Bau’’ [‘‘The Burrow’’] he made a metaphor for his life. The text is like a
riddle. The text is fun to read because Kafka hid the meaning. I would like to
read more Kafka. When I learned that Kafka was the mole, I wanted to read
more Kafka.
I played Irmgard [Keun] for my role play, and I think now that she is
important to me. This is the reason why I made an exit to her [room].
Perhaps, because she is not as well-known as Kafka, Mann or Luxemburg, it is
good to make an exit to Irmgard. Although she does not have as strong
opinions as Rosa Luxemburg, she is also fascinating.
I built an exit to Stefan’s room. I interpreted it and gave him a present. His
autobiography contains many insights into life, which caused me to reflect on
my childhood. Stefan’s life is similar to the lives of the authors [that we read].
Stefan and the authors lived in countries with political unrest. Thomas Mass,
Irmgard Keun, and Rosa Luxemburg experienced the Nazis, while Stefan
experienced a communist government.
Although written by a student with some of the weakest linguistic skills in the
class, this essay is nonetheless impressive for what it conveys about the vari-
ety, depth, and richness of her reading practices at the low-intermediate level.
Like nearly every other student in the class, Lucy chose a combination of
student writing (Nora’s room and Stefan’s self-description) and course read-
ings (Kafka, Keun, and Lasker-Schüler). She also cites Thomas Mann and
Rosa Luxemburg. More significant, however, is the range of reading practices
138 Silke von der Emde and Je√rey Schneider

she cites to explain these choices. Her exit to Lasker-Schüler’s room empha-
sizes her pleasure in the multiplicity of meanings that result from the collab-
orative reading process, while her ‘‘tunnel’’ to Kafka’s room stresses a similar
pleasure in the play of uncovering textual secrets hidden in the text. (Tunnel
is a metaphor we introduced in the assignment. Of course, it is particularly
appropriate in terms of Kafka’s text, which is about a mole’s paranoid rela-
tion to his burrow.)
Lucy’s connections to texts are also highly personal and complex. Playing
Keun in the role play, for instance, gave her a personal connection to that
author that seems not to have originated in the first reading of that text—so
personal, in fact, that Keun is the only published author she cites by first
name. In fact, Lucy’s connection to the text might say more about her own
quiet and shy demeanor in class, particularly when we worked outside the
MOO, since her explanation rests less on an identification with Keun’s active
and distinctively modern heroine or even Keun’s own rich and politically
irreverent biography than on her (correct) perception that Keun has been
overlooked and underappreciated in comparison to her peers. Calinescu sug-
gests that such personal identifications with authors and texts reflect ‘‘the cir-
cularity of the reader’s time as opposed to our habitual historical conscious-
ness of an inflexibly linear, unidirectional time’’ (1993, p. 53). For instance,
although Lucy shares with her classmates an enthusiasm for Radiohead, her
decision to link her room with Nora’s stems from a new appreciation of
Radiohead’s social criticism as an extension of the battle of early twentieth-
century German artists and intellectuals against the restrictive bourgeois
conventions of the time, one of the themes that Lucy repeatedly identified in
the various course readings. Likewise, she selects Stefan’s self-description not
only for its intertextuality with the German texts of authors who confronted
National Socialism but also for the way that it causes her to return to her own
childhood.

Concluding Remarks
Although even students with relatively weak language skills proved
adept at describing complex reading practices in the target language, we also
required students to reflect in English on their writing, reading, and learning
as part of our e√ort to achieve sustained self-reflection over the course of the
semester. These English-language reflections accompanied their learning
portfolio, which consisted of printouts of all their writings in the MOO (in
their various versions) as well as other assignments completed outside the
MOO, such as grammar exercises and personal vocabulary lists. Intended as a
 Experiential Learning 139

general statement about their overall language learning during the semester,
the final self-reflection assignment nevertheless produced many outstanding
testimonies on the impact of these reading practices, including this excerpt
from Annette:

My work with the language this semester has heightened my love for it and
my desire to come to a deeper understanding of it. This is due to the way in
which the class entirely changed my view of language acquisition. Through
the texts we read, as well as the study of the Weimar Republic, the articles and
the ideas of our own classmates, I have come to understand that language is
much more than a spoken word. It is also about culture and literature, and
about exploring and finding our own selves within a new medium. This
understanding has made German so much more exciting for me, and it
makes me so much more eager to continue in my study of the language. . . .
Equally important are the ways in which my study of German this semester
has actually helped me in all aspects of my life. Our concentration on identity
has forced me to look within myself more than I normally would have, and it
has helped me to understand myself and to use this understanding to aid in
di√erent areas of my life. Through study of di√erent texts, I’ve learned that,
though I’m a non-native speaker, I can still bring about my own inferences
and opinions towards German literature. Knowing this makes the study of
texts so much more exciting for me, and I now feel so much more confident
and capable in my reading and analysis. This also extends to literature in my
own native language. I find myself more readily reading into the many dif-
ferent meanings that a piece of literature presents, and I am much more open
to the many di√erent possibilities that can be found within it.

In addition to our readings in German, students also read over the course
of the semester a number of articles in second language acquisition research,
including Kramsch’s ‘‘Privilege’’ essay. Our goal in assigning these texts was to
give students the ideas and vocabulary to reflect critically and independently
on their language learning and to involve them as collaborators with us in
helping to set the direction of the course. Although the activities of this
course inspired Annette in part to spend her junior year studying in Vienna,
her sense of the reading and language study that took place in the course is
not limited to its practical benefits for engaging with members of the target
culture. Instead, she points to a richer, perhaps liberating, sense of pleasure,
knowledge, and self that emerges from the collaborative, experiential, and
circular reading practices. Annette identifies the ideas of her fellow students
alongside the texts themselves as a source for her new understanding of
language study, which she explicitly defines as more than oral proficiency and
which she implicitly portrays as involving more than communication. In her
140 Silke von der Emde and Je√rey Schneider

description, reading exceeds classification as a mere skill among others. In-

stead, the act of reading becomes a profound set of experiences with texts—
experiences that lead beyond particular knowledge about a specific text or
about German texts to emerge as a way of experiencing, well, experience
itself—in the form of reflections on identity, the self, and the very engage-
ment with culture, regardless of language. In the end, Annette’s notions of
reading emerge from language learning and continue to inform her under-
standing of language acquisition. They also incorporate into a third-semester
course the rich notions of reading that are the hallmark of literary studies,
cultural studies, and other upper-level courses.
We do not wish to claim that this kind of productive, imaginative foreign
language reading at the intermediate level can only occur in the MOO, since
most literary critics suggest that there is no other way to read complex texts.
The point is not to make technologies such as the MOO the privileged site of
a new pedagogy. Rather, if, as Richard Kern predicts, ‘‘the most profound
e√ects of computer technology on literacy and language learning will likely
arise . . . from the new forms of information dissemination and social inter-
action made possible by local and global computing networks’’ (Kern 2000,
p. 237), then it becomes valuable and necessary to explore, identify, and
harness the productive benefits of network-based language technologies. In
our case, using the MOO enabled us to rethink the possibilities for low-
intermediate reading in much the same way as our students: as a collabora-
tion between ourselves and our students, as a set of experiences that required
constant reflection throughout the semester, and as a process of returning
again and again to our students’ writings, discussions, and reflections as well
as the primary texts. Together our students have produced a series of readings
and texts that remain in the MOO as invitations to subsequent users to, in
Joyce’s words, ‘‘join with us in shapeful behavior’’ and recognize ‘‘how mean-
ing is made’’ (2000, p. 43). In our MOO, students’ rooms and writings remain
unless or until the student decides to recycle or delete his or her objects.
There are now several generations of student rooms in MOOssiggang.
More important than the MOO itself are the theoretical and practical
insights that can be derived from its use as a means of foregrounding for
students the essentially collaborative, experiential, and circular nature of
reading. It is interesting that in her statement, Annette only refers obliquely
and indirectly to the MOO (‘‘a new medium’’) and focuses instead on the
benefits derived from that experience ‘‘in all aspects of my life,’’ even the
experience of reading in her native language. In this manner, Annette not
only lays claim to the fundamental importance of foreign language study for
a broad liberal arts education but she reverses the traditional trajectory of
 Experiential Learning 141

reading development as proceeding unidirectionally from one’s native lan-

guage to the foreign language, suggesting instead that students might actually
become better readers in their first language by learning to read critically and
creatively in the second. Likewise, we want to emphasize that the MOO
helped establish a paradigm for reading in the intermediate foreign language
classroom based on approaches to reading that are typically reserved for
upper-level classes in the foreign language or for classes conducted in En-
glish. This semester-long approach to foreign language reading promises to
make even lower-level courses part of the broader liberal arts curriculum,
since it seeks to impart life-long critical thinking skills as well as practical
language skills. But it also expanded for us our own sense of what students are
capable of achieving at the low-intermediate level, especially since students’
ability to articulate thoughtful intertextual connections and reflect on the
reading process not only occurred in the students’ English-language state-
ments but also in the German-language texts they produced in response to
the course readings. Ultimately, we believe that the collaborative experience
of literally and figuratively entering the web of texts produced in our class
gave our students a profound new sense of what reading in the foreign
language can really mean and do.

Acknowledgments
We thank Peter Patrikis, Michael Joyce, Amanda Thornton, and our co-
teacher at Williams College, Valerie Weinstein, for their enthusiastic support
of our work and the students of Vassar College’s German 210 and Williams
College’s German 103 for their patience and willingness to experiment. We
also acknowledge the Steering Committee of the Vassar-Williams Mellon
Grant on Teaching with Technology in the Foreign Languages for funding
this collaborative venture.

Notes
1. See Selfe and Hilligoss (1994) for an overview of parallel e√orts in one of the other
traditionally skills-based areas of the liberal arts curriculum, English composition, that
have productively used computers to integrate some of the diverse theoretical insights
from literary and cultural studies into their teaching, research agenda, and endeavors to
reform the curriculum.
2. Our German-language MOO is called MOOssiggang and can be accessed via Net-
scape 4.5 (or higher) or Microsoft Explorer 5.0 (or higher) with the URL »http://
iberia.vassar.edu:7000…. Our MOO core, which represents the latest generation of MOOs,
is open source freeware developed by Jan Rune Holmevik and Cynthia Haynes, the
142 Silke von der Emde and Je√rey Schneider

creators of LinguaMOO, which is based at the University of Texas at Dallas. The en-Core
MOO Educational Core Database can be downloaded free of charge from the Lin-
guaMOO website »http://lingua.utdallas.edu…. For an overview of other educational uses
of the MOO, see Haynes and Holmevik 1998. Their student guide, MOOniversity, is also an
excellent resource for beginners.
3. In an earlier version of this class, in which a few of the same texts were used, students
explicitly asked for more background on the primary texts. Based on this feedback, we
decided to make available excerpts from secondary materials about the authors, their
texts, and the time period. After an initial reading of the primary German-language texts,
students returned to discuss them a second time in small groups after they had a chance to
draw on the secondary sources to help expand their readings of the primary texts. In this
case, one of the background texts dealt with Mann’s homosexuality.

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 8

Double-Booked: Translation, Simultaneity, and

Duplicity in the Foreign
Literature Classroom
mark webber

Introduction
The German word Orchideenfächer refers to academic subjects that are
as beautiful and endangered as rare orchids—and as removed as these flowers
from the political and practical concerns of daily life. Although English lacks
a one-word equivalent, teachers of foreign language and literature in North
America can instantly sense the metaphor’s double import. It suggests that
what we do, lovely though it may be, does not connect with or influence the
real world in the same way that engineering, for example, does. According to
this metaphor, there is a unidirectional barrier between our disciplines and
the real world. That barrier prevents us from influencing the real world, but it
does not shield us from that world’s depredations. What is worse, our pur-
ported separation from that world counts as a liability when real-world
concerns (such as student-teacher ratios and in-field employment rates of
graduates) provide the criteria for academic decisions.
The lack of reciprocity inherent in the metaphor’s dual thrust leads teach-
ers of foreign language to practice. Indeed, we must come to terms with
multiple duplicities that involve and question the theoretical, ethical, and
pedagogical bases of the profession even as they engage the duplicitous poli-
tics of the academy and of society at large.
In this chapter I examine those duplicities as both challenges and oppor-

144
 Double-Booked 145

tunities for the teaching of foreign language literacy. I do so by presenting a

case study of twinned courses—one in English and one in the target lan-
guage—on the writings of Franz Kafka. After explaining my terminology,
particularly with reference to the paper’s title, I shall sketch the political and
institutional framework within which the courses originated. I then focus on
the students, subject matter, and underlying pedagogical approach of these
courses. In the final section I consider the roles of translation and metaphor
with the broader theoretical and pedagogical context of foreign language
teaching and learning. Throughout, the chapter raises questions of not only
whom we are teaching, but what we are teaching them and why.

Terminology
What does the title mean by ‘‘double-booked’’? First, as teachers, schol-
ars, and administrators, we are increasingly under pressure to do multitask-
ing. Sometimes, when there are not enough hours in the day or students in
the classrooms, we are required to be in two places at one time. That is one of
the things to which the title adverts, and it is one of the pressures to which the
Kafka courses respond. Second, being ‘‘double-booked’’ refers to the fact that
in order to teach twinned courses, one must ensure that the reading list is
available in both German and English and that the marks go to the right
o≈ce for the right students. In this context keeping two sets of books is an
administrative necessity. Here as in the field of accounting, however, keeping
two sets of books may strike us as a dubious practice that requires investiga-
tion, whether forensic or academic. Third and most important, the phrase
‘‘double booked’’ should be understood metaphorically, also in a double
sense: as a figurative expression for being in two mental spaces at the same
time and as a metaphor for the way in which metaphor itself functions.
These notions of doubleness tie in directly to the key words of the subtitle:
translation, simultaneity, and duplicity. Of course, the idea of mentioning the
first two words in relation to each other arose as a typically bad pun on simul-
taneous translation. Yet even this pun provides an opportunity to question
both the phrase and its constituent elements. First, there is translation itself,
which, if translated into Greek, comes out looking quite like the word meta-
phor (metafora): both denote a kind of carrying over from one realm to
another; or, to put it metaphorically and somewhat di√erently, both require
being in two places at one time (see Godard 1990, p. 22). Second, there is the
notion of simultaneity. Anyone who has experienced simultaneous transla-
tion—or more accurately, simultaneous interpretation—knows that it is any-
thing but simultaneous. Does the claim of simultaneity, then, like the notion
146 Mark Webber

of double-booking, also involve the third term of the subtitle, duplicity?

Again, this is itself a duplicitous term, for duplicity means, first, and in
common parlance, dishonesty. A duplicitous statement is not what it pur-
ports to be. In this sense, there is less to it than meets the eye. Simultaneously,
however, it signals gemination, a doubling that resists being brought to-
gether. The double valence of duplicity raises the following questions: To
what extent do the Kafka courses, and courses like them, provide value added
by doing more than one thing at one time? To what extent are they frauds
perpetrated on students, academic administrators, and ourselves?
Finally, there is the potential duplicity of this paper itself, plowing as it
does a double path that steers simultaneously for the Scylla of ‘‘show-and-
tell’’ and the Charybdis of abstraction in the name of theory, and all with the
hope of avoiding both. Since, however, I cannot describe both headings si-
multaneously, I shall begin by tacking toward Scylla.

The Frame
The framework for university language teaching in North America is
changing, and nowhere is it changing more dramatically and (potentially)
more dangerously than in the Province of Ontario. In my own field of Ger-
man, several departments or programs have already been shut down; others
are ‘‘on probation,’’ either from their own institutions or from provincially
mandated oversight bodies; and still others know that where the action of
university administrations will not close them, inaction and attrition will.
The problem is not limited to German or to Ontario. In response to expres-
sions of concern from around the country, the Humanities and Social Sci-
ences Federation of Canada (HSSFC) has convened a special working group
both to analyze where we are and to recommend where we should be going.
Ordinarily I would not dignify the attitude of the government of the
Province of Ontario toward what we do for a living by acknowledging it. But
because, like Everest (or Scylla, perhaps), it is there, and because it is both
symptomatic and profoundly constitutive of the conditions in which we
work, I will mention it. Briefly, the premier (the equivalent of the governor)
of Ontario has made it abundantly clear that, from his perspective, the hu-
manities and social sciences are irrelevant, and the only thing that matters
is computer science along with allied disciplines. The Ontario Ministry of
Training, Colleges, and Universities—the sequence here is significant, espe-
cially since, in Canadian parlance, a college is not (yet) a degree-granting
institution of higher learning but a polytechnic—is increasingly directing
 Double-Booked 147

how the publicly financed universities of the province use provincial funding.
Universities that resist run the risk of being punished financially.
No matter how sympathetic a dean is (and ours is genuinely sympathetic),
there is increased and increasing pressure to ensure that the courses we o√er
actually attract students. In responding to the Dean’s O≈ce, departments and
individual faculty members may not see eye to eye. Those of us who teach in
departments of foreign languages and literatures work with the consequences
of changes in the secondary schools. (French, as one of Canada’s o≈cial
languages and a mandated subject, is not a foreign language in this context.)
If a declining number of students enroll in a foreign language in high school,
that means that of the declining number of students who enroll in a language
at university, still fewer come to us with the background to work in nontrans-
lated literature, at least at the beginning. Moreover, as someone who also
teaches a first-year foundations course that looks at animals in the literary
imagination—a course in the Division of Humanities that explicitly teaches
critical thinking, organizational, and writing skills—I can confirm the ob-
vious: the overall literacy skills of our students, however we may wish to
characterize them, present the context in which we work also in the foreign
languages.

The Focus
What does all this mean for the specific courses that serve as my case
study? At first glance, the humanities course, taught in English, might seem
to be an unremarkable example of the species of course that has existed for
decades, the kind we call literature in translation. For as long as enrollment
has been the battleground, literature in translation has been the answer to
English departments or Divisions of Humanities that have been, to use a
loaded word, poaching our game. There is an interesting displacement at
work here, however. The English departments do not usually consider these
courses to be, let us say, German literature in translation. They consider them
simply as literature courses, part of their academic franchise. It is we who
use the phrase in translation as both a come-on to prospective students—
‘‘No knowledge of German required’’—and as a concessive, almost self-
flagellatory, signal to ourselves: ‘‘I know it’s not the real thing, but I have
no choice.’’
In fact, the Kafka courses have a slightly di√erent history. The Division of
Humanities at York is an interdisciplinary teaching unit in the Faculty of Arts.
Humanities courses are key elements of our general education requirements,
148 Mark Webber

and the division is the home of several interdisciplinary programs such as

religious studies and German studies. (The Kafka course counts toward the
major requirements of both programs.) The division also has an undergradu-
ate major in its own right, to which may soon be added a graduate program.
Having been cross-appointed between German and Humanities since the late
1970s, in the early 1980s I introduced a full-year course on Kafka for Humani-
ties within the rubric ‘‘Writers in Their Age.’’ The course satisfied both upper-
level general education requirements, as they were then constituted, and
major requirements for both Humanities and Religious Studies. A few years
later, I developed, within the curriculum of the Department of Languages,
Literatures, and Linguistics, a half-course in German that also centered on
Kafka. The two courses had di√erent numbers, di√erent clienteles, and dif-
ferent foci, and they were o√ered in di√erent years. Only in the 1990s, when
the pressures to which I have alluded became more severe, did they come
together in their present duplicity.
That constellation brings me back to the questions I enumerated at the
beginning of this essay: Whom are we teaching? What are we teaching them?
and why? By asking whom, I am not simply reverting to the question of the
preparation of students entering university in the twenty-first century. Sitting
in my classroom, or potentially attracted to it, are several groupings of stu-
dents whose backgrounds, interests, and needs di√er in crucial respects. In
order of numbers, the humanities students predominate. Because the shape
of the Faculty of Arts curriculum has changed since the inception of the
humanities course, students no longer enroll in order to fulfill their upper-
level general education requirements. The Humanities, German Studies, and
Religious Studies majors taking the course for major credit—and English,
creative writing, philosophy, and fine arts students who enroll in it as an
elective—constitute the great majority of course members. They are in the
course because they want to be, and they are among the brightest and most
interesting students in the Faculty. Only in rare cases do they know German.
The students who enroll through German may or may not be native speakers,
and sad to say, they are not all that often the best and the brightest. In the
context of my training, the conference for which this essay came into being,
and the Consortium that organized it, it seems obvious that I should be
concentrating on the students who enroll in the German course. In fact, I will
be arguing that to give priority to the students enrolled through German is a
mistake, even from the perspective of foreign language teaching.
My answer to the question ‘‘Whom are we teaching?’’ is intertwined with
the next question: What are we teaching them? Since the end of World War II
(or before), the question of what we are teaching our students has received
 Double-Booked 149

changing answers. Probably not many of my readers were on the receiving

end of the so-called grammar-translation approach, although translation
exercises and tests are still important parts of the high-school and university
foreign language curricula in Germany. In North America, I would venture
the guess that the word translation occurs in course descriptions primarily in
two contexts: first, in courses or curricula dedicated to developing skills in
translating as an expertise and profession in its own right, and second, in the
context of literature in translation.
As we know, however, there is a constant rebalancing of priorities within
the profession of foreign language teaching, and over the past several years
there has been a rekindling of interest in reading as a skill and a pedagogy; the
conference for which this essay was conceived simultaneously reflected that
interest and sought to influence the debate. From my perspective much
progress has been made in recognizing that (1) reading involves and invokes
processes and skills that are also entailed in producing and responding to
spoken language; (2) reading in a second or foreign language is a particular
case of intercultural understanding that entails the same techniques and
processes as those used in responding to other intercultural phenomena; and
(3) reading and intercultural understanding are analogous processes that are
not ‘‘passive’’ or ‘‘receptive’’ but active and creative (Webber 1993, p. 3).
Seen in this way, foreign language literacy is a special case of literacy in
general, but it also highlights aspects of literacy that may get lost in courses
dealing with first-language textuality. All of this takes place in the context of a
liberal arts agenda that is increasingly under attack. Cli√ord Adelman’s de-
scription of a developmental model of foreign language education that situ-
ates it within a larger approach to university teaching is still relevant (Adel-
man 1984, p. 115):

The developmental model respects the notional-functional approach to

learning and the needs of students—from gathering information to suasion—
in real cultural contexts. The drive of the developmental model is toward
student autonomy, toward tolerance for ambiguity and complexity, and to-
ward the perception of an instructor as a resource (not as an external, author-
itative repository of knowledge). In Arthur Chickering’s words, the model
drives toward the capacity to generate paradigms, insights, judgments, and to
reorganize past conceptions on the basis of new experiences. The role of
curriculum under that model, Chickering would say, is to pose key dilemmas
to students.

Conceptually, pedagogically, and politically, to exempt ourselves and our

students from this curricular responsibility is to sell ourselves and them
150 Mark Webber

short. We become complicitous in reducing language teaching to a non-

academic, technical activity, thus reinforcing the marginality of language
programs within the university. This reduction takes place when our pro-
grams face a contradictory situation. They are simultaneously under mount-
ing pressure to demonstrate that they deserve a valued place as contributors
to the core intellectual mission of the university, and they have the means to
do so. This contradiction is matched by another. For at the same time as
language pedagogy is becoming more content-based and—dare we say it?—
more academic, the university, at least in Ontario, is in the process of becom-
ing less academic and more technical. Are our trajectories converging? Will
they shoot past each other, merge, or collide, bringing each other down?
Similar questions about convergence, merging, or mutual destruction pre-
sented themselves with reference to the two original courses on Kafka, one
taught exclusively in German and one taught exclusively in English, in the
sense that these were the languages of the texts as well as of the classroom. In
the end, I opted for duplicity. There would be twin courses, each with its own
number and reading list, and each taught in its own language.
Logistically, the trick (and I use the word consciously) was to find a way of
teaching the courses simultaneously, not just during the same academic term
but literally at the same time. Only in this way would there be enough
students, through combining the enrollments, to justify the o√ering. Only in
this way could the German section provide su≈cient courses at the upper
level to allow our majors to take honors degrees. So I came to be double-
booked: with two courses, two class lists, two grade books, two reading lists,
and one classroom. Actually, this is not quite true: because the group meets
together for three hours per week, and because most of the students do not
know German, the plenary meetings are held in English. Still, the students
enrolled through German do their readings and most of their written work in
German. In any case, I meet with them for an extra hour per week to take up,
in German, issues specific to the German texts.
The words ‘‘the students enrolled through German do their readings . . . in
German’’ arose almost automatically from the keyboard. Saying this was
duplicitous, though not consciously so. To be more accurate: The students
are assigned the texts in German, but do they really read the German texts?
And do I really expect them to? The answer has two levels: one descriptive,
the other prescriptive. Some of these students do read only the German texts,
because to read the English texts, too, would take more time. It is clear,
however, that many of them read the English texts as their primary source,
while skimming the German texts because they know we will be discussing
them in the class time reserved for this purpose.
 Double-Booked 151

A Gaggle of Geese, a Duplicity of Texts

This section of the chapter picks up on discrepancy between descrip-

tion and prescription, which also reveals a gap between theory and practice.
To do so requires reading Kafka as a special case of literacy, and this special
case involves a brief detour into Kafka-land.
One of the most di≈cult issues in dealing with Kafka is the state of the text.
Until the critical edition began appearing in the 1980s, many of the texts we
had—the texts that had made Kafka into the best-selling author he became
decades after his death—were not authentic. That is one reason why my
course syllabi claim that Kafka is one of the most widely read and most
widely misunderstood authors in the canon of university courses in litera-
ture, philosophy, religious studies, and political science.
Kafka became known in North America on the basis of his novels, par-
ticularly through the novel usually called in English The Trial, but also
through The Castle. The problem is that he completed neither of these manu-
scripts. His literary executor, Max Brod, ignored Kafka’s instructions to de-
stroy all unpublished works and edited and published them both, along with
other unfinished texts, in such a way as to protect and enhance the image of
his friend—at least as Brod imagined that image. The received Kafka canon,
therefore, is based on duplicity, in the second sense of the word and perhaps
also in the first. The first act of translation that we as readers and teachers
have to undertake with respect to such works, then, is to translate back from
the canonical text to the authorial text, or as close as we can get to it. As
a√ordable editions with more reliable texts become available, it is possible to
dispense with tables that show how the structure of a work has been rear-
ranged by Brod from that in the manuscript. Part of reading is thinking
about the status of the text, however, and so this is a practice that also has a
pedagogical justification, whatever edition we are reading.
The pedagogy involves demonstrating—and having the students respond
to—the notion that reading is not a passive process but involves active cre-
ativity on the part of the reader. One way of approaching this notion is
to show that the text itself is not a product but a process, something that
leads us also from the level of organization to that of word meaning, since
the word by which Kafka referred to his novel, Der Process, means both
‘‘trial’’ and ‘‘process.’’ Another way of illustrating this notion to the students
is to confront them with various of Kafka’s false starts (or trial runs) or major
variants from his manuscripts (for example, Kafka 1992, p. 343). These
texts interact with one another in a way that makes it obvious that any
notions of the linear order of reading are misplaced; they make it necessary
152 Mark Webber

and possible for the students to make sense by creating their own order
among and for the texts.
A major problem with translations of Kafka is that his language is meta-
phorical in a special way. He often uses what I call radical metaphor, which
activates the slumbering etymological root of the expression and thereby
revivifies what might be overlooked as figuration or might otherwise be
taken as dead metaphor (see Harman 1996, p. 300 and p. 310, n. 30). A famous
example is the word ungeheuer, commonly translated as ‘‘monstrous’’ or
‘‘gigantic’’ when it appears in a Kafka text published during his lifetime. In
the story known as The Metamorphosis, the protagonist, Gregor Samsa,
awakes to find himself transformed into a huge beetle. Ungeheuer here is an
adjective describing that bug. (I shall not recount the secondary literature on
the subject. See the summary in Corngold 1973, p. 11 and the etymology and
definitions in Grimm 1984.) The root of the word has to do with home-iness,
so that its negation, which Kafka utilizes, comes to mean huge and mon-
strous (that is, abnormal in size, shape, and appearance) by virtue of not
being part of the family, not being housebroken, so to speak. Gregor as bug is,
so far as his family and employer are concerned, outside the bounds of the
familiar, beyond the pale. Without coming close to a full reading of the story,
I would assert that Gregor’s transformation into a spineless creature (as he
calls his superior at work) is an expression of both his punishment for and his
redemption from his life. Gregor is not at home with himself or his family,
but neither he nor they are aware of this condition until his so-called meta-
morphosis. But this is not an occasion to interpret Kafka, so let us return to
issues of language.
In the conference presentation of this essay, I asked participants what they
had thought of when they heard the phrase ‘‘beyond the pale.’’ Like them, I
had thought of the Pale of Settlement, an overtly discriminatory corpus of
legislation that restricted the places of residence of Jews to the Russian prov-
inces, which had been annexed from Poland, and to New Russia (Klier 1986,
p. 75). The OED, however, lists the noun pale in no less than seven senses,
deriving from the original meaning of stake, ‘‘a pointed piece of wood in-
tended to be driven into the ground, esp. as used with others to form a fence’’
(OED, 1971, 2:390). By extension, the word comes to designate the enclosure,
literal or figurative, demarcated by that fence. To be beyond the pale, then, is
to be out of those bounds. What does this have to do with reading in a foreign
language? It illustrates some of the methods that we and our students should
be practicing in support of both the general and specific goals of literacy
toward which our courses, in the target language, in translation, and in the
interstices between them, should be striving.
 Double-Booked 153

For the students of both German and humanities, it is e√ective, in this

context, to let them work with texts as (1) intertexts, texts by Kafka and others
that challenge students and allow them to make connections, and (2) as
interlanguage between German and English. A short example will be instruc-
tive here. The etymology of ungeheuer is significant, but it can also be the
subject of a lecture in either German or English. What is more interesting
and pedagogically productive is to juxtapose texts, as in examples (1) and (2).
(1) I ordered my horse brought Ich befahl mein Pferd aus dem Stall
from the stable. The servant did not zu holen. Der Diener verstand mich
understand me. I went into the sta- nicht. Ich ging selbst in den Stall,
ble myself, saddled my horse and sattelte mein Pferd und bestieg es. In
mounted it. In the distance I heard a der Ferne hörte ich eine Trompete
trumpet sounding; I asked him what blasen, ich fragte ihn, was das be-
it meant. He knew nothing and had deute. Er wußte nichts und hatte
heard nothing. At the gate he de- nichts gehört. Beim Tore hielt er
tained me and asked: Where are you mich auf und fragte: +Wohin reitest
riding to, Master? I don’t know, I Du, Herr? *Ich weiß es nicht*, sagte
said; just away from here, just away ich, +nur weg von hier, nur weg
from here. Incessantly away from von hier. Immerfort weg von hier,
here, only in this way can I reach my nur so kann ich mein Ziel er-
goal. So you know your goal? he reichen.* +Du kennst also Dein
asked. Yes, I answered, I already Ziel?* fragte er. +Ja*, antwortete
said: Away-from-Here, that is my ich, +ich sagte es doch, Weg-von-
goal. You don’t have any provisions hier, das ist mein Ziel. +Du hast
along, he said. I don’t need any, I keinen Eßvorrat mit*, sagte er. +Ich
said; The journey is so long that I brauche keinen*, sagte ich, +die
must starve to death if, on the way, I Reise ist so lang, daß ich verhungern
don’t get anything. No provision muß, wenn ich auf dem Weg nichts
can save me. For happily, you know, bekomme. Kein Eßvorrat kann mich
it is a truly monstrous journey. retten. Es ist ja zum Glück eine
(Kafka 1983, p. 449) wahrhaft ungeheuere Reise.* (Kafka
1986, p. 384)

(2) The Next Village Das nächste Dorf

My grandfather used to say: Life is Mein Großvater pflegte zu sagen:
astonishingly short. Now in my +Das Leben ist erstaunlich kurz.
memory it compresses itself such Jetzt in der Erinnerung drängt es
that I can scarcely comprehend, for sich mir so zusammen, daß ich zum
example, how a young person can Beispiel kaum begreife, wie ein
resolve to ride into the next village junger Mensch sich entschließen
without fearing that even discount- kann ins nächste Dorf zu reiten,
ing unhappy coincidences ohne zu fürchten, daß von un-
154 Mark Webber

even the time of a normal, happily glücklichen Zufällen ganz abgesehen

passing life will not su≈ce by far for schon die Zeit des gewöhnlichen,
such a ride. (Kafka 1983, p. 404) glücklich ablaufenden Lebens für
einen solchen Ritt bei weitem nicht
hinreicht.* (Kafka 1996, p. 342)
Working in small groups, the class can make connections of intertext and
interlanguage, connections that in turn raise questions (I have boldfaced,
italicized, and otherwise marked certain connections in the texts to illus-
trate some of the possibilities). For the students who do not know German,
the course provides a bridge, and perhaps some incentive, to learning it. For
the students who do know German, questions not only about Kafka’s Ger-
man lexicon but also of the adequacy of the translation point to interpre-
tative issues.
Instead of attempting to make the text transparent, this approach thickens
the text by doubling it. This doubling is not simply a question of pointing out
to students when a translation is, in my opinion, ‘‘wrong,’’ or when it does not
pick up on strands in Kafka’s language. Interestingly, the sessions held in Ger-
man often begin with questions from the students about single words, and the
language of the sessions, though predominantly German, sometimes switches
to English and sometimes reverts to the interlanguage we call Genglish.
The doubling of language as an attempt to be in two places at one time, to
double-book, as my title would have it, includes a resistance to being im-paled,
fenced in, restricted to a single position. As shown in example 3, Kafka speaks
to this in his metaphor of Einpfählen, which insists on its own metaphoricity
through the duplicitous use of the word apparent (scheinbar).
(3) All human errors are impa- Alle menschlichen Fehler sind Un-
tience, the premature breaking o√ geduld, ein unzeitiges Abbrechen
of what is methodical, an apparent des Methodischen, ein scheinbares
fencing in of the apparent thing. Einpfählen der scheinbaren Sache.
(Kafka 1991, p. 15) (Kafka 1992, p. 32)
The fencing in, or impaling, of which Kafka speaks is apparent, precisely
because both the circumscription and the item being circumscribed lack
essence. On one hand, then, the error is categorical, a mistaking of the husk
for the kernel. On the other, it is not beyond redemption since the error itself
must be superficial only. Any limitation that one can impose applies to that
which is already limited; the infinite cannot be boxed in.
The degree to which Kafka lends himself to the pedagogical approach I am
describing and advocating becomes even clearer in another set of Kafka texts
that revolve around issues of stability, unity, and duplicity. The following
examples illustrate Kafka’s own duplicity in geminating texts that resist final
 Double-Booked 155

form. At the same time, he reiterates the notion that truth is indivisible. The
good news is that it exists and that it can be perceived to exist; the bad news is
that in order to accomplish this perception, one must be outside the pale, the
pale that truth cannot in any case abide.
(4) There are only two things. Es gibt nur zweierlei: Wahrheit und
Truth and lies. Truth is indivisible, Lüge. Die Wahrheit ist unteilbar,
hence it cannot recognize itself; any- kann sich also selbst nicht erkennen.
one who wants to recognize it has to Wer sie erkennen will muß Lüge
be a lie. (Kafka 1991, p. 35) sein. (Kafka 1992, p. 69)

(5) Truth is indivisible, and thus Wahrheit ist unteilbar, kann sich
cannot itself know itself; he who also selbst nicht erkennen; wer sie
wants to know her must be Du- erkennen will, muß Lüge sein.
plicity. (Kafka 1991, p. 35) (Kafka, 1992, p. 130)

As these examples suggest, the thematic and conceptual ties between Kafka
as thinker and writer and a double-booking, double-dealing, bifurcated,
forked-tongued course about him are multiple. Despite Max Brod’s attempts
to create Kafka the novelist, Kafka was most prolific as a writer of short texts,
many of them fragmentary beginnings in his notebooks that beg for comple-
tion. They lend themselves in length and open structure to creative responses
from students whose first language is not German. They place issues of
language and textuality in the foreground, both implicitly and explicitly. The
history of their editing and translation is itself on the table for discussion. And
a major theme for Kafka is precisely duplicity, again itself in twofold sense.
First, as seen in examples 1, 2, 4, and 5, there is the e√ort to be in two places at
one time, places we can term life and death, or the spiritual and the physical,
or the eternal and temporal realms, pursuit and patience, essence and appear-
ance. There is a tendency to use terms that are themselves metaphors, though
metaphors that resist the human impatience to arrive at certainty by con-
flating the metaphorical tenor and vehicle, in part by virtue of their apparent
lack of the tenor (see Webber 1995, p. 7). Second, there is the consciousness of
duplicity, of the opposition between unity and duality, which is both a struc-
tural and thematic element of Kafka’s thought and writing.

Metaphor and Translation: Singularity and Unidirectionality

Earlier, I remarked on the a≈nity of the two terms and concepts of
metaphor and translation. Both are duplicitous in that they require us to be in
two linguistic and conceptual realms at the same time. From my perspective,
both are quintessentially interpretive and persuasive (rhetorical) operations
156 Mark Webber

that lie at the heart of language and cognition. Making their workings ob-
vious to students—and involving students as interpreters and practitioners of
these operations—is both theoretically and practically legitimate and impor-
tant in the context of foreign language education. This includes, of course,
the intercultural component at the same time as it works in the direction of
content-based teaching and learning.
Lawrence Venuti’s book The Translator’s Invisibility (1995, p. 306; compare
Venuti 1996) makes a similar argument:
Translation is a process that involves looking for similarities between lan-
guages and cultures—particularly similar messages and formal techniques—
but it does this only because it is constantly confronting dissimilarities. It can
never and should never aim to remove these dissimilarities entirely. A trans-
lated text should be the site where a di√erent culture emerges, where a reader
gets a glimpse of a cultural other, and resistancy, a translation strategy based
on an aesthetic of discontinuity, can best preserve that di√erence, that other-
ness, by reminding the reader of the gains and losses in the translation
process and the unbridgeable gaps between cultures.

Conclusion
This chapter takes up a series of duplicitous—double—relationships
that a√ect our ability to foster foreign language literacy in our students. I
began by outlining the political contexts in which our teaching takes place.
Whether others situate the foreign language philologies and pedagogies as
Orchideenfächer is largely beyond our control. The metaphor’s thrust is in-
structive, however. Its unidirectionality o√ers a negative paradigm for deal-
ing with the other duplicities that the chapter addresses. Those duplicities,
whose dual nature necessarily evoke our own ambivalences, can o√er oppor-
tunities for learning. As Venuti points out, these opportunities require that
we resist the temptation to create seeming identities, or even unidirection-
alities, in the relation between tenor and vehicle, culture of translation from
and culture of translation into. Preserving duplicity, as I have discussed
it here in its logistical, pedagogical, and theoretical facets, can be a lib-
erating exercise for ourselves and for our students. It should therefore come
as no surprise that Venuti recommends Kafka as a writer of resistance and
liberation.
In advocating the inclusion of translation in the teaching of foreign lan-
guage literacy, and in asserting the e≈cacy of geminated courses, I am obvi-
ously not arguing for the reinstatement of the grammar-translation method.
Nevertheless, it remains to be seen whether the senses of duplicity that I have
 Double-Booked 157

developed here are applicable in other contexts. In particular, we need to

discuss (1) whether the constellation that operates in the Kafka courses is
‘‘translatable’’ to other contexts; and (2) whether the peculiar combination of
philology and liberal arts education that I have been advocating is e√ective
from the perspective of foreign language pedagogy. If the answer is negative,
then translation may indeed, as the Italian phrase goes (traduttore traditore),
constitute a form of duplicitous betrayal. If, however, we can answer in the
a≈rmative, then translation will not be a traducer but an opportunity to
practice, for ourselves and for and with our students, fundamental skills and
acts of critical thinking and interpretation.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am indebted to Sandra Gerbrandt of York University for bibliograph-
ical assistance. The fact that this is a revised version of an oral presentation
will not escape the reader; I have retained some of the stylistic features of the
original paper.

References
Adelman, C. (1984). Language Study and the New Reform in General Education. In
Strategies for the Development of Foreign Language and Literature Programs, edited by
Claire Gaudiani et al., pp. 109–21. New York: Modern Language Association.
Corngold, S. (1973). The Commentators’ Despair: The Interpretation of Kafka’s
Metamorphosis. Port Washington, N.Y.: National University Publications.
Godard, B. (1990). A (Re)Appropriation as Translation. Canadian Theatre Review 64
(fall): 22–31.
Grimm, J., and W. Grimm. (1984). Ungeheuer. Deutsches Wörterbuch, vol. 11, sec. III.
1936, facsimile reprint Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, vol. 24, col. 691–
707.
Harman, M. (1996). Digging the Pit of Babel: Retranslating Franz Kafka’s Castle. New
Literary History 27: 291–311.
Kafka, F. (1983). The Complete Stories. Edited by Nahum Glatzer. New York: Schocken.
———. (1991). The Blue Octavo Notebooks. Edited by Max Brod. Translated by Ernst Kaiser
and Eithne Wilkins. Cambridge, Mass.: Exact Change.
———. (1992). Nachgelassene Schriften und Fragmente, II. Edited by Jost Schillemeit. In
Franz Kafka: Schriften, Tagebücher, Briefe: Kritische Ausgabe. Edited by Jürgen Born et
al. Frankfurt: S. Fischer.
———. (1996). Die Erzählungen und andere ausgewählte Prosa[: Originalfassung]. Edited by
Roger Hermes. Fischer Taschenbücher, 13270. Frankfurt: Fischer Taschenbuchverlag.
Klier, J. D. (1986). Russia Gathers Her Jews: The Origins of the Jewish Question in Russia,
1772–1825. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press.
Rivera-Mills, S. V., and B. N. Gantt. (1999). From Linguistic Awareness to Cultural
158 Mark Webber

Awareness: A Translation Framework for the Spanish Language Classroom. Journal of

Language for International Business (JOLIB) 10(2): 1–13.
Venuti, L. (1995). The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation. Translation
Studies. London: Routledge.
———. (1996). Translation and the Pedagogy of Literature. College English 58(3) (March):
327–44.
Webber, M. J. (1993). Reading as Resistance: An Integrated Approach to Advanced
German. Paper presented at the Panel ‘‘Reading at the Advanced Level: Who? What?
How?’’ Convention of the Modern Language Association of America, Toronto,
Ontario (December 29).
———. (1995). The Metamorphosis of the Foreign Language Director, or: Waking up to
Theory. In Redefining the Boundaries of Foreign Language Study, edited by Claire J.
Kramsch, pp. 185–217. Issues in Language Program Direction. New York: Heinle &
Heinle.
 9

Ethics, Politics, and Advocacy in the

Foreign Language Classroom
n i c o l a s s h u m way

Ethics, Politics, Morality, Advocacy—these are big words that I could

never define to my own satisfaction, and probably not to anyone else’s. So
rather than try to define them in any abstract sense, I would like to do what
literary people and historians like me do best: I would like to tell some stories.
The first story—actually more an observation than a story—comes from
La Divina Commedia of Dante. In the poem Dante is allowed a lengthy
journey during which he observes the state of many individuals enduring the
punishments of Hell, undergoing the healing and reconciliation of Purga-
tory, and experiencing the eventual joy of Paradise. In a recent conversation,
Peter Hawkins, who has published a book on Dante and the Bible, pointed
out something quite peculiar about the individuals in Hell: they are alone—
physically, but also emotionally and spiritually (Hawkins 1999). They are
incapable of talking about anything but themselves, and they cannot ac-
knowledge other people. The message is a powerful one: Hell is utter ob-
session with oneself, the inability to take into account, much less imagine,
another human being. When Dante arrives in Purgatory, we note something
quite di√erent: the people in Purgatory, although still far from perfect,
come in pairs and groups. For Dante, then, Hell is total isolation, whereas
reconciliation with God begins with the reconciliation of one human being
with another.

159
160 Nicolas Shumway

So what does this have to do with language teaching and literacy? A great
deal, I would suggest. As language teachers, we issue an invitation to our
students and provide a mechanism for imagining others and thereby for
escaping a particular aspect of Dante’s vision of Hell. For in Dante we see the
ethical failure of truncated individuals who are in Hell partly because they
were obsessed with themselves. They made no room for other people, and to
some degree, despite their self-obsession, they probably failed even to imag-
ine themselves particularly well. For that reason, there is always an ethical
component in our task as we address questions like the following: What do
we teach? Whom do we choose to talk about? Whom do we include, and
whom do we decide to erase or just leave out? And what do students learn
about themselves in this conversation with other people and other cultures?
Roman Catholic theology has given us a memorable phrase in this regard
when it teaches of ‘‘the dignity of the human person.’’ A very similar phrase
occurs in the opening sentence of the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights, approved by all members of the United Nations in 1948 and one of
that organization’s charter documents. In that declaration we read: ‘‘the in-
herent dignity . . . of all members of the human family is the foundation of
freedom, justice and peace in the world.’’ Later in the same document we find
the term again in the phrase ‘‘the United Nations have in the Charter re-
a≈rmed their faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of
the human person and in the equal rights of men and women.’’
Before I go on, let me emphasize that the notion of the dignity of the
human person is a premise. (In geometry it would be called an axiom.) It is
not a conclusion, it is not the result of an argument, and it cannot be proven
using logical or empirical methods. Nor is it subject to Fishy arguments that
would relativize everything. It is, in short, a position that we choose to
embrace because we choose to embrace it. And making that choice involves
what the German theologian Karl Barth would call a leap of faith, unsup-
ported by corroborating evidence.
But once we make that leap to respect the dignity of the human person, we
immediately find ourselves in a complex, shifting world that I am calling
politics. Respect implies a community of at least two, someone who respects
and someone who is respected. As the etymology of the term politics suggests,
politics is about the polis, about relationships within a given community.
Politics can choose to be unethical by failing to account for the other. But it
will always wrestle with ethical questions. Consequently, it is only within a
political frame—that is, within the relations between individuals—that we
can talk about respect for the dignity of the human person.
As language teachers providing mechanisms for imagining other people,
 Ethics, Politics, and Advocacy 161

much of what we teach involves politics, particularly as we endeavor to teach

literature and culture. For example, in teaching about Spanish American
history and culture, I usually begin the story of Spanish America with the
story of the Spanish Reconquest, a movement in which Spanish Christians
begin driving Moors and Jews southward and eventually decreeing the expul-
sion of all non-Christians from the Iberian peninsula. That impulse for
expansion and Christianization did not stop at Spain’s southern borders.
Rather, it continued for three centuries into what we call the Americas. The
Reconquest is, consequently, an essential starting point for understanding the
mentality of the Spanish conquistadores and colonizers who implanted their
culture in a new continent. To the degree that students know anything about
these events, they have no trouble condemning the Reconquest as an ethical
failure, what with its religious intolerance and ethnic cleansing. Moreover, if I
give students the vocabulary, they have no trouble condemning those phe-
nomena based on respect for the dignity of the human person. Easy, right?
But then we read sections from Spain’s great epic poem of the Reconquest
El Cid. Mixing literature with ethics always clouds things. What can seem
blazingly clear in the abstract goes out of focus as soon as we start imagining
such abstractions in the context of individual human experience. In a memo-
rable essay titled ‘‘El primer Wells,’’ Borges once remarked that a literary text
is never a single object; rather, it is a focal point of myriad relationships,
capable of an infinite and plastic ambiguity (Borges 1995, p. 137). For some,
he says, it is the Apostle, for others it is a map of the world, for still others it is
a mirror of the reader’s face, and for most of us it is all of these things at once.
As always, Borges chose his images well. Literature is like the Apostle, the
divinely sent messenger, because we expect the literary text to tell us some-
thing transcendent. Even in the most secular societies, people still turn to art
as a kind of surrogate religion, because in some sense the art object allows us
to feel, if not religion, at least religious nostalgia. The literary text is also a
map of the world, as it implants in our fancy images of people and places we
could not imagine otherwise. And yes, literature is also a mirror, for often it is
in dialogue with the product of someone else’s imagination that we find the
ability to imagine ourselves.
And all of this happens when we read El Cid. Whether they have seen the
Charleton Heston film or not, the Cid is hard for most Americans to dislike.
When the work begins, he is a man who has fallen into disgrace, a classic
underdog, a kind of poor kid from the other side of tracks who blew his best
chance at getting ahead. But with a lot of e√ort, he curries the favor of the
rich and the powerful, shows himself to be a highly successful Rambo-style
soldier, and becomes, perhaps, the first self-made man in literary history.
162 Nicolas Shumway

Now we can condemn what the Cid did, but can we imagine the Cid? Can we
stop abstracting about the dignity of the human person long enough to try to
really imagine him? And it is here that things get more complicated, for,
although killing Moors, even with the alleged assistance of Saint James the
Apostle, bothers people, the Cid is right up front about his motives: he wants
to honor his religion, serve his king, and accrue a bit of property and per-
sonal glory for himself. God, country, and personal success are his motives.
And they are motives that speak loudly and clearly to many of my students.
Moreover, although we may regret his methods, did not the Cid simply want
to raise his family in a Christian nation, where everyone spoke the same
language? And how was he to know that three hundred years later the move-
ment he assisted would culminate in the expulsion of the Jews and Moors,
clearly one of the most shameful events in Spanish history?
Ethical ambiguities pile up even more in Spanish American culture courses
when we start talking about the evangelization of the indigenous populations
of Spanish America. As uncritical heirs to the notoriously anti-Catholic and
anti-Spanish historiography of Anglo-America, my students are prepared to
denounce the Spanish as gold-grubbing, virgin-raping, nature-destroying
native killers. And I would quickly include myself among the many who
lament the genocidal intolerance of the conquest and the ecological devasta-
tion wrought by imported crops and farm animals, not to mention illnesses
against which the indigenous populations had no immunity. But here it is
worthwhile to remember that the first task of ethics is not condemnation but
imagination.
Take, for example, the Spanish missionaries. Can we imagine what they
might have felt in their encounters with the native peoples? Let me try to
reconstruct one of the scenes they might have seen. Human sacrifice—blood
sacrifice—was a common practice in all of Meso-America. The Aztecs, for
example, indulged in something called the War of Flowers in which they
would capture enemies to be sacrificed. And these were not just the average
sacrifice. The ideal was to extract the heart of the victim as it was still beating.
Close your eyes a minute and visualize with me how the Aztec priest would
bind the victim to a flat rock. He would then plunge a stone dagger into the
victim’s chest, scoop out the heart, and raise it with both hands above his
head in such a way that the blood from the still-beating heart would stream
down his arms, torso, and legs, until it wet the ground. Now, I seriously doubt
that even the most politically correct among us could witness such a scene
and then say to a neighbor, ‘‘Well, that’s just their culture.’’
Condemning these practices and events is easy—especially at this distance.
What is not easy is imagining the human beings who committed such ac-
 Ethics, Politics, and Advocacy 163

tions. I cannot speak of what the Aztecs had on their minds, but of the
Roman Catholic missionary priests we know a great deal, because they left us
extensive writings—a literacy that we can try to penetrate. We know, for
example, that they lived with incredible contradictions, for at the same time
they condemned blood sacrifice among the American indigenous, they had
no trouble accepting autos-da-fe in which the Inquisition burned heretics at
the stake, events that were at least as horrific as the Aztec sacrifices. And we
also know that as they lived with these contradictions, they also believed in
the dignity of the human person, for they read it, preached it, and no doubt
in many cases practiced it.
But can we really imagine them? Do we know what motivated men to
abandon the safety of Spain and venture into uncharted lands inhabited by
unknown and frequently hostile peoples in order to teach and maybe convert
them to Christianity? Do we know what spurred successive generations of
missionaries to continue in that holy errand, knowing full well that more
than half their number would meet an early death from starvation, illness, or
murder at the hand of the peoples they sought to save? And can we under-
stand why some of them rose to great moral heights in trying to protect the
Indians from other Spaniards?
What, for example, moved Father Antonio Montesinos to stand in his pul-
pit in 1511, only nine years after the founding of Hispaniola, now the Domini-
can Republic, and denounce his fellow Spaniards in the following terms?

I am the voice crying in the wilderness. You are in mortal sin . . . for the
cruelty and tyranny you use in dealing with these innocent peoples. . . . Tell
me by what right or justice do you keep these Indians in such cruel and
horrible servitude? . . . Are these not men? . . . Have they not rational souls?
Are you not bound to love them as you love yourselves? Be certain that, in
such a state as this, you can no more be saved than the Moors or Turks. (cited
in Herring 1960, pp. 173–74)

The literacy Montesinos shared with his congregants might have made recog-
nizable the reference to John the Baptist as the voice crying in the wilderness.
Similarly, his congregation no doubt already would have heard Jesus’ com-
mandment about loving others as we love ourselves. And even if a few of his
listeners missed those references, every self-respecting Spaniard of that time
would have felt insulted at being compared to Moors and Turks. My question
is this: What motivated Father Montesinos to denounce his faithful and
virtually assure that he would be put on the next ship back to Spain?
And what would motivate his fellow Dominican, Bartolomé de las Casas,
to devote his entire life to protecting the Indians from abuse at the hands of
164 Nicolas Shumway

the Spaniards? Largely because of Father las Casas’s bravery, the indigenous
populations gained a place in the Spanish colonial polity—a place, I might
add, that they lost after the wars of independence and that they have yet to
regain. Now, we can rightly point out that their place in the polity was often
observed more in the breach than in the fact, but it nonetheless existed and
stands in sharp contrast to the fumbling and ultimately much more cruel
practices of their English counterparts in North America.
As a language and literature teacher trying to put students in close contact
with another culture, I see as one of my tasks that of imagining those remark-
able people, in hopes that in those imaginings we might find the beginnings
of ethical understanding. Only then can we try to see how they felt the ethical
imperative of imagining the dignity of the human person as they dealt with
the politics of their time, with the pressures of living in their communities.
Up to this point, I have talked about medieval heroes and sixteenth-
century missionaries. Since these people lived centuries before our own time,
it is relatively easy to consider abstract ethical questions in the context of their
distant lives. Ethical questions are always clearer when the examples are not
right in your face. But as participants in the a√airs of our own time and as
teachers of younger generations, we face issues not unlike those I have de-
scribed, and these issues cannot but intrude in our classrooms. Consider
some of the examples I have confronted as a teacher of Spanish literature.
Spanish is not only the language of Cervantes, Lorca, and Borges. It is also
the language of children living their entire lives in the garbage dumps of
Mexico City and finding in the leavings of other people all their food and all
their clothing—and the occasional sellable item that allows them periodically
to participate in the money economy. They can tell their stories in Spanish,
and through Spanish we can try to imagine them, their lives, their dignity,
and their negotiations with the political realities of their existence. Why not
include in our courses Alma Guillermoprieto’s ‘‘Letter from Mexico City,’’
which concerns the tragic existence of these children?
Spanish is also the language of Argentina’s desparecidos, the disappeared
whose numbers are sometimes estimated to be near 30,000. It was in Spanish
that they were wrenched from their homes, tortured, and murdered. And it is
in Spanish that their relatives pressure government o≈cials to tell the truth
about what happened in those awful years between 1976 and 1983. Should we
not include, perhaps, excerpts from Jacobo Timmerman’s moving testimony
of his own experience as a ‘‘disappeared’’ in Preso sin nombre, celda sin
número?
It is in Spanish that President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela has resurrected a
kind of populist-leftist rhetoric that the triumphal neoliberalism of the early
 Ethics, Politics, and Advocacy 165

1990s had pronounced dead. And it is in Spanish that he justifies making

friends with outcasts such as Saddam Hussein and Fidel Castro, while the
United States maintains an embarrassed silence because most of our im-
ported oil comes from Venezuela. Should not our students perhaps hear
some of his ideas in his own words, easily accessible on the Internet?
It is in Spanish that thousands of young Mexican girls leave their homes to
flock to the U.S. border, where they earn meager wages to manufacture
inexpensive goods for export to the United States, now imported without
duty because of the transformations wrought by NAFTA. These are vulner-
able women, often abused and raped by men who, in Spanish, resent the
women’s new-found independence and its challenge to male dominance—as
is told in a beautiful book of testimonies called La flor más bella de la ma-
quiladora, recently translated and published by the Teresa Lozano Long In-
stitute of Latin American Studies, which it is my honor to direct, with the title
Beautiful Flowers of the Maquiladora.
It is in Spanish that thousands of Mexicans cross illegally into the United
States to subsidize with their labor and low wages the lifestyle we enjoy. It is in
Spanish that they miss their families and each week send back to Mexico
funds estimated in the tens of millions of dollars. And it is in Spanish that
many of them utter their last words as they die because their coyote took their
money and abandoned them in the Sonora Desert. Why not include in our
language courses articles by Jorge Bustamante, a Mexican sociologist who on
several occasions disguised himself as an immigrant laborer and then wrote
about the harrowing experiences of what it is like to be in the United States as
an illegal worker?
And finally, it is in Spanish that thousands of Hispanic immigrants to this
country experience the challenges of assimilation, the pain of discrimination,
and the not infrequent success that adds to the powerful immigration narra-
tives that occupy such a prominent place in this country’s collective imagina-
tion. Many texts tell this tale, perhaps none better than Gustavo Perez-
Firmat’s Life on the Hyphen.
This, of course, is a minuscule list, but it demonstrates that the study of
Spanish o√ers many opportunities for imagining others by penetrating their
codes of literacy. This list is also colored by politics, for there is not a single
item on it that does not reflect the judgments that communities make in
order to see or erase other people, to hear or remain deaf to their stories.
In some cases, the politics impinge directly on us. Throughout the United
States, we all live better because undocumented Spanish-speaking laborers
pick our vegetables, build our houses, make our clothes, and work in the
kitchens of our restaurants, often under conditions no American citizen
166 Nicolas Shumway

would accept and in constant fear of being apprehended by a U.S. govern-

ment organization euphemistically called a Service. Moreover, it is not un-
usual to read news stories like that of the Los Angeles clothing manufacturer
who regularly arranged for agents of the U.S. Immigration Service to raid his
factory the day before payday. Similarly, the women who work in the border
maquiladoras enter our houses daily through the goods they manufacture,
thus benefiting us with their low wages and unhealthy living conditions.
In sum, choosing to teach their stories is an ethical choice, for we are
asking ourselves and our students to imagine the lives of people who are often
erased from public consciousness. And in imagining their lives, we must also
imagine their humanity and their right to dignity. This choice is not only an
ethical one, for it immediately involves us in politics. But unlike the politics
of the Cid or of those sixteenth-century Spanish missionaries, we are players
in these politics. Choosing to imagine those people—to penetrate their
literacy—places them in our community, which in turn challenges us to take
a stand. And taking a stand brings me to the third term in my title: advocacy.
We hear contradictory statements about advocacy. Right-wing pundits of
varying sorts tell us we should teach values but not indoctrinate, but they are
not very helpful in drawing the line between the two. Folks to the left are
often no better when they preach a stultifying political correctness, better for
stopping a conversation than for starting and maintaining one. Others say we
should let the facts speak for themselves and then allow the students to
choose whatever they want. The problem is that the facts never speak for
themselves, for no understanding comes without interpretation. Moreover,
by exercising our duty as teachers to choose certain topics rather than others,
we have already become advocates of sorts.
I have no chirpy little formula for resolving the dilemma of, on one hand,
advocating things I believe in while, on the other, creating an environment in
which students feel free to disagree with me. I can, however, point out several
moments in my teaching when students have disagreed with me in spec-
tacularly e√ective ways—which leads me to believe that advocacy in an atmo-
sphere that permits disagreement is not impossible. Let me tell you about two
recent experiences.
In teaching Mexican history, one cannot ignore the fact that the United
States, after occupying Mexico City, forced Mexico in 1848 to sign a treaty
that ceded more than half its national territory to the United States. My
students usually do not know about those events, although most of them can
sing the verse in the Marine Hymn that memorializes the occasion in its
reference to the Halls of Montezuma. The brazen imperialism of the U.S.
invasion of Mexico led such eminent Americans as Abraham Lincoln, Ralph
Waldo Emerson, and Mark Twain to condemn the war, thus contributing to
 Ethics, Politics, and Advocacy 167

the pressures that eventually led Congress to pay Mexico $17 million in guilt
money for territories that had in fact never been for sale.
I tell this story as an advocate, wanting my students to question other
examples of U.S. expansionism, including our government’s meddlesome
policies of more recent times and the truly frightening prospect of American
military involvement in Colombia in the name of the war against drugs. You
can therefore imagine my chagrin when a Mexican student raised his hand
and said, ‘‘Of course the really bad thing about the outcome of the war is that
the United States kept the part with all the paved roads.’’
It was a funny and no doubt flippant remark, but it also made a fundamen-
tal point that neoconservatives never tire of making, namely, that investment
in an orderly society increases wealth and that such investment happened on
one side of the border to a much greater degree than on the other. I imme-
diately asked him if that justified the war, to which he replied with a Spanish
proverb, ‘‘No hay bien que por mal no venga’’ (‘‘No good thing comes but by
way of evil’’). Someday I want to write a book on how proverbs can abort
productive discussion—but I stray from my subject.
My second example happened only last year when I included a section on
the pan-Mayan movement, which is sweeping much of Guatemala and parts
of southern Mexico and Honduras. To explain the significance of the move-
ment, I spent a good deal of time on the history of how political elites, from
the Spanish conquest forward, had fragmented the indigenous communities.
I described how the United Fruit Company virtually owned Guatemala for
much of the twentieth century. I also discussed how the Guatemalan military
in the 1980s, with the support of several U.S. presidents, killed many thou-
sands of Indians in the name of combating Communist guerrillas, whom the
indigenous communities were allegedly supporting. And I described the at-
tempts being made to forge a unified political movement, based in part on
recent linguistic research that sought to create a written, pan-Mayan dialect
that might help all indigenous peoples move toward a mutually comprehen-
sible language.
And I got in lots of trouble. My primary accuser was an upperclass student
from Guatemala who said she was tired of Americans like me who could only
talk about the problems of Latin America and never bothered to give the
point of view of the middle class, which was trying to modernize their
country and to bring it into the world economy. And of course, she was right.
Latin America is filled with thousands of decent, hard-working, middle-class
people who never cease striving to improve their countries. Indeed, it is often
because of them that we can tell the stories of the underclasses that I want to
include. I was both delighted that these people were upset and delighted with
their disagreements with me. But they made such good points that I also had
168 Nicolas Shumway

to conclude that advocacy has its limits and that indoctrination just is not
what it used to be and probably never was.
It appears that in this essay what I have mostly done is tell stories. From
Dante, I concluded that ethical understanding begins with an attempt to
imagine the other and that that notion is implicit in much of what we do as
foreign language teachers. In stories about the Cid and two Dominican
priests, I considered the similarity between the politics in old stories and the
politics in our stories, and I reiterated my wonderment about what could
make people like Antonio Montesinos and Bartolomé de las Casas defy the
powers of their time on behalf of the Indians. I then gave examples of some of
the stories that we might tell in our own Spanish language classrooms and
suggested that Dante’s injunction to imagine the other falls just as strongly on
us as on his lost souls in Hell. I then suggested that in choosing what stories
we teach, we cannot avoid politics. Nor can we avoid becoming advocates and
taking sides. But I also told how my own experiences with advocacy often go
awry, and blessedly so, since nothing could be worse than ending the di-
alogue or stopping the conversation.
And that is actually what I hope will happen with this essay: that it will
prod us to remember that comparing literacies is an ethical endeavor; that it
will help us remember that politics cannot be avoided; and that advocacy is
part of what we are all about—even if it is highly unlikely that any of us will
ever have the last word.

References
Borges, J. L. (1952). El Primer Wells. In Otras inquisiciones, pp. 103–6. Madrid: Alianza
Editorial.
Guillermoprieto, A. (1990). Letter from Mexico City. The New Yorker 66 (Sept. 17): 93–
104.
Hawkins, P. S. (1999). Dante’s Testament: Essays on Scriptural Imagination. Stanford:
Stanford University Press.
Herring, H. C. (1960). A History of Latin America. 2d ed. New York: Knopf.
Iglesias Prieto, N. V. (1985). La flor más bella de la maquiladora: Historias de vida de la
mujer obrera en Tijuana. Mexico City: Secretaría de Educación Pública. Beautiful
Flowers of the Maquiladora. Translated by Michael Stone. Austin: University of Texas
Press, Institute of Latin American Studies.
Pérez Firmat, G. (1994). Life on the Hyphen: The Cuban-American Way. Austin, Tx:
University of Texas Press.
Timerman, J. (1982) Preso sin nombre, celda sin número. Barcelona: Editorial Cid.
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 Contributors

Associate professor of French linguistics in the Department of French and

Italian at the University of Texas at Austin, carl blyth is also the current
director of Technology, Literacy, and Culture, an interdisciplinary concentra-
tion in the College of Liberal Arts. He coordinates the Lower Division French
language program and teaches courses in French linguistics, sociolinguistics,
and applied linguistics. His research interests include discourse grammar,
sociocultural theories of language learning, and instructional technology. In
collaboration with departmental colleagues, he has completed several tech-
nology projects including an on-line reference grammar of French and an
electronic textbook for first-year French called Français interactif. Currently,
he is working on an edited volume for the series Issues in Language Program
Direction titled The Sociolinguistics of Foreign Language Classrooms: Contri-
butions of Native, Near-native, and Non-native Speakers (Boston: Heinle).
silke von der emde is associate professor of German studies at Vassar
College. She has published articles on GDR literature, feminist theory, and
German film and is currently completing a book on GDR author Irmtraud
Morgner. She and her colleague Je√rey Schneider have used MOOs exten-
sively for collaborative language learning projects between students at Vassar
College and other colleges and universities in the United States and Germany.
An associate professor of Slavic languages at Brown University, masako

169
170 Contributors

ueda fidler is currently executive o≈cer of the North American Association

of Teachers of Czech and co-editor of its newsletter, Czech Language News.
Her publications deal with Russian morphosyntax and comparative analysis
of discourse strategies in Czech, Japanese, and Russian. She is working on the
Brown Czech Anthology, a Web site project currently supported by the Con-
sortium for Language Teaching and Learning.
Senior lecturer in the Section of Languages and Literatures at the Mas-
sachusetts Institute of Technology, gilberte furstenberg is the principal
author of the pioneering multimedia fiction A la rencontre de Philippe and of
the interactive documentary Dans un quartier de Paris. Both of these pro-
grams have won many awards, including the Gold Medal in Interactive Video
from Cinema and Industry (Los Angeles), the Mark of Excellence award from
the International Interactive Communications Society (Washington, D.C.),
and the Prix Special du Jury at the Innovalangues competition at Expo-
langues (Paris). Her current teaching and research focus on computer-based
cross-cultural communication and understanding.
william a. johnson is assistant professor of classics at the University of
Cincinnati. In the 1980s he was co-developer, with David W. Packard, of the
Ibycus Scholarly Personal Computer, the first computer to allow the editing,
search, and retrieval of ancient texts in a fully integrated desktop package,
and one of the first two companies in the United States to market an applica-
tion for CD-ROM technology. Since that time, he has returned to the acad-
emy, where he has written and lectured extensively on books, readers, and
reading in the ancient and modern worlds. A study titled Bookrolls and
Scribes in Oxyrhynchus is in press at the University of Toronto, and he is
currently working on a book titled Readers and Reading Culture in the Early
Empire.
richard g. kern is associate professor of French and director of the
French language program at the University of California at Berkeley. He
supervises graduate teaching assistants and teaches courses in French, ap-
plied linguistics, and foreign language pedagogy. His research interests in-
clude reading and writing in a foreign language and the use of networked
computers to facilitate communicative language use. His most recent book,
Literacy and Language Teaching, deals with the theory and practice of reading
and writing in a foreign language. He also recently co-edited a collection
of research studies with Mark Warschauer titled Network-Based Language
Learning: Concepts and Practice.
peter c. patrikis is the founding executive director of the Consortium for
Language Teaching and Learning, an assembly of ten private research institu-
tions including Brown University, the University of Chicago, Columbia Uni-
 Contributors 171

versity, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, the Mas-

sachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton
University, and Yale University. He has published and lectured widely in the
United States and abroad on foreign language education, the place of com-
puter technology in higher education, and general education.
jeffrey schneider is assistant professor of German studies at Vassar
College. Together with Silke von der Emde, he has developed an on-line
German-language MOO called MOOssiggang, which has been used suc-
cessfully in a variety of courses at Vassar. In addition to ongoing research on
technology in the foreign language curriculum, he is currently writing a
book-length study of militarism, masculinity, and male sexuality in imperial
Germany.
The Tomás Rivera Regents Professor of Spanish American Literature at the
University of Texas at Austin, nicolas shumway is the director of the Teresa
Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies. He has published exten-
sively on Spanish American literature and cultural history and is also author
of a successful first-year Spanish language textbook, Español en Español. His
book The Invention of Argentina was selected by The New York Times as a
notable book of the year. He is currently completing a book on the literature
and thought of the nineteenth-century independence movements in Spanish
America.
mark turner is a distinguished professor at the University of Maryland,
where he is a member of the department of English language and literature
and the doctoral program in neuroscience and cognitive science. He has
written articles and books on the nature of cognition and language. In 1996,
the Académie française awarded him the Prix du Rayonnement de la langue
et de la littérature françaises.
Associate director of the Canadian Centre for German and European
Studies at York University (Toronto), mark webber teaches German and
humanities. Co-author of Für- und Widersprüche, an advanced-level content-
based textbook for German studies, he has also published on issues of nine-
teenth- and twentieth-century German literature, metaphor, curriculum
design, and interculturality. He is program o≈cer of the Ontario/Baden-
Württemberg Student Exchange and co-director of the Canadian-German-
Polish project ‘‘Learning from the Past—Teaching for the Future.’’
 Index

Page numbers in italics refer to figures or Bloom, Harold, 3

tables. Blyth, Carl, 6, 68, 70
Bolinger, Dwight, 70
ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines, 45 Bolter, J. D., 12
Adelman, Cli√ord, 149 book rolls, ancient, 13–14
advocacy, 166–68. See also foreign language books, demise of, 2–3, 12–13
study, ethics in Borges, Jorge Luis, 161
A’Ness, F., 121 Brandt, Deborah, 44
apprenticeship, 53–57, 119 Brod, Max, 151
Arens, Katherine, 5, 47, 119 Brown, H. D., 41
Auden, W. H., 69 Brown, P., 109
authentic artifice, 62 Brown (University) On-Line Czech An-
authentic/natural language, 61–62 thology, 114
Bruner, Jerome, 1
Bachman, L. F., 41 Bustamante, Jorge, 165
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 76 Byram, Michael, 93
Beautiful Flowers of the Maquiladora Byrnes, Heidi, 5, 47, 48, 119
(Prieto), 165
Beauvois, M. H., 123 Calinescu, Matei, 120, 133, 135, 138
Becker, A. L., 69–70 CALL (computer-assisted language learn-
Berman, Russell, 47–48, 128 ing), 118
blending. See conceptual integration Canale, M., 41

173
174 Index

Carruthers, M. J., 12 scope integration, defined, 25; in foreign

cartoons, conceptual integration in, 25–27 language learning, 38; grammatical con-
Caton, S., 63 structions used in, 27–33; literacy’s de-
Chaput, Patricia, 4 pendence on, 34; modern cognition,
Chávez, Hugo, 164–65 emergence of, 24–25; and prose styles,
child language, 66–67 34–37; resultative construction used in,
Chung, S., 104 28–30, 33
classroom: detached from culture, 42, 114; context, cultural. See cultural context
in geminated courses (see Kafka courses, Context and Culture in Language Teaching
York University); reading culture in, 20. (Kramsch), 47
See also curricula; teachers, view of Cook, Guy, 61–62, 63, 66–67
Clinton, William J., 101–2, 103, 104, 106–7, Corngold, S., 152
109–11. See also languages, uncommonly Coverly, Dave, 27
taught Cribiore, R., 14
CLT (communicative language teaching). cross-cultural understanding, di≈culty of,
See communicative language teaching 74–75, 76. See also Cultura project
(CLT) Cultura project, 6, 75–98; comparative ap-
cognition and literacy. See conceptual inte- proach, benefit of, 76, 81; cross-analysis
gration forums, 81, 83, 85–90; cross-analysis of
cognitive model, in the reading process, 15–16 text materials, 91–93; development of, 75;
Cole, M., 44 forums, e√ect of, 83, 86, 90–92; free-
Coleman, A., 40 dom/liberté, forum on, 86; individual-
Coleman Report, 40 ism/individualisme comparison, 79, 79–
ComeniusWeb, 114 80, 86–90, 92; meaning, focus on, 76;
communicative language teaching (CLT): opportunity, forum on, 85–86; a rude
and the apprenticeship model, 53–54; person/une personne impolie com-
and authentic/natural language, 61–62; parison, 80–81, 84–85; suburb/banlieu
vs. critical competence, 125; vs. literacy- comparison, 77–79, 78; well-behaved
based teaching, 40–42, 46–47; and ne- child/un enfant bien élevé comparison,
glect of serious reading, 2; and the poetic 80, 82–83
function (see poetic function); purpose cultural context: blending templates, 37, 38;
of communication in, 63; and referential and Internet education, 113–14; in less
language, 61, 63 commonly taught languages (see lan-
computer use: advantages of, 3–4, 18–19, guages, uncommonly taught); literacy,
20–22, 118–19, 123, 140; as agent of cultural, 46, 47–48; the textual and the
change, 10, 11–12; and books, demise of, social, tension between, 121. See also
12–13; CALL, 118; for grammar instruc- Cultura project; reading culture
tion, 70–71; on the Internet (see Internet curricula: introductory vs. advanced, gap
education); NBLT, 118; and paradigm between, 40, 43, 45–46, 48, 53, 119, 121;
shift in reading, 15–19; rote learning for literacy-based teaching, 50–57, 53, 54,
through, 70–71 57; rote learning, and the poetic func-
conceptual integration, 5, 24–39; blending tion, 69–71. See also classroom; curric-
templates, 34, 36, 37, 38; cartoon exam- ula; teachers, view of
ples of, 25–27; defined, 25; ditransitive Czech, 112–16. See also languages, uncom-
construction used in, 30–33; double- monly taught
 Index 175

Dante Alighieri, 159, 160 Freire, Paulo, 43

Deale, Frank, 26 French: in Cultura project (see Cultura
‘‘Déjeuner du Matin’’ (Prévert), 60–61 project); and the poetic function, 60–61,
desparecidos, 164 70–71; resultative constructions in, 33
Divinia Commedia, La (Dante), 159, 160 Friedrich, P., 67
double-scope integration, 25. See also con- Furstenberg, Gilberte, 4, 6
ceptual integration
Doughty, C., 68, 121 Givon, T., 103
Dr. Seuss, 60, 72–73 Godard, B., 144
drills, 69–71 Goldberg, A., 28, 30, 31, 32
Du√elmeyer, F. A., 113 Goodman, Ellen, 72–73
duplicity, and Kafka courses. See Kafka Goody, Jack, 10, 11
courses, York University grammar instruction: and cultural blend-
Dyson, Esther, 3 ing templates, 38; and the poetic func-
tion, 68–69, 71; through rote learning,
Eisenstein, E., 11 69–70
El Cid, 161–62 grammar translation approach, 2, 53–54, 149
electronic revolution, as paradigm shift, 10, Grandjean-Levy, Andrée, 3
12–13. See also computer use Greece, ancient: book rolls, 13–14, 15; as
Emde, Silke von der, 6, 122 oral culture, 10–11, 13; and the Oxy-
emotive function, 64. See also poetic func- rhynchus community, 21–22; reading
tion paradigm of, 14–15, 19
ethics. See foreign language study, ethics in Guillermoprieto, Alma, 164

Fairclough, N., 100, 110 Harman, M., 152

Farley, T., 44 Havel, Vaclav, 102–7, 111–12. See also lan-
Fauconnier, Gilles, 25 guages, uncommonly taught
Fidler, Masako Ueda, 6 Havelock, Eric, 10, 11
Finnegan, R., 11, 12, 20 Hawkins, Peter, 159
flor más bella de la maquiladora, la (Prieto), Heath, S. B., 20, 44
165 Hebrew, 33
Focus-on-Form movement, 68–69, 121 Highfield, R., 3
foreign language literacy. See literacy-based Hino, N., 46
foreign language teaching humanities studies: decline in, 21, 144, 146–
foreign language study, ethics in, 7, 159–68; 47; foreign language study, importance
and advocacy of views, 166–68; Chávez, of, 4–5, 120, 140–41, 149–50. See also for-
Hugo, 164–65; desparecidos, 164; El Cid, eign language study, ethics in
161–62; Guatemala and the United Fruit Hymes, D., 41
Company, 167; human dignity as prem-
ise of, 159–60; immigrants, Hispanic, immigrants, Hispanic, 165
165–66; maquiladoras, 165; Mexican pov- ‘‘Im Spiegel’’ (Mann), 123–27, 142n3
erty, 164; Mexican War, 166–67; vs. poli- input enhancement, 69
tics, 160–66; Spanish American inquiry subsets, 48
missionaries, 162–64. See also cultural Institut National des Télécommunications.
context; humanities studies See Cultura project
176 Index

Internet education: for cross-cultural un- Clinton, macro-level reading of, 109–11;
derstanding (see Cultura project); and Clinton, micro-level reading of, 101–2,
cultural context, 113–14; for learning 103, 104, 106–7; Czech, teaching of, 112–
Czech, 112–16; MOO (see MOO); navi- 16; di≈culties in teaching, 99; discourse
gational aids, 16–17; in the new reading strategies, 110–12; first person forms,
culture, 18–19; and reading, renewed in- 101–3; first person predicates, 109–10;
terest in, 3–4 Havel, macro-level reading of, 111–12;
introductory vs. advanced curricula, gap Havel, micro-level reading of, 102–7;
between, 3, 40, 43, 45–46, 48, 119, 121 macro-level reading, need for, 112, 114,
Israel, M., 33 115; micro-level reading, 100, 101–8, 114–
15; modality, 103–5; Mori, macro-level
Jakobson, Roman, 62, 63–64, 65–66 reading of, 109–11; Mori, micro-level
Japanese. See languages, uncommonly reading of, 102, 103, 107–8; politeness
taught markers, 107–8, 109; relational values,
Johnson, S., 3 defined, 100; third person forms, 105–7;
Johnson, William A., 5, 13, 15 and Web reading materials, 112–16
Joyce, Michael, 118, 128, 140 Lantolf, J. P., 2, 4
Jurasek, Richard, 48 Larson, Gary, 27
Las Casas, Bartolomé de, 163–64
Kafka, Franz, 134–35, 151 Lee, J. F., 63, 121
Kafka courses, York University, 7, 144–58; less commonly taught languages. See lan-
authenticity of texts, 151–52; double- guages, uncommonly taught
booked, meaning of, 145; duplicity, Levet, Sabine, 75
meaning of, 145–46; framework of, 146– Levinson, S. C., 109
47; geminated, 147–48, 150; intertext and Life on the Hyphen (Perez-Firmat), 165
interlanguage, 153–55; Metamorphosis, literacy: blending, dependence on, 34 (see
152; metaphor and translation, 145, 152, also conceptual integration); definitions
155–56; students, profile of, 148; The of, variable, 43–45; vs. oral culture, 10–
Trial, 151 11, 12; as reading culture, 9–10; research
Kern, Richard G., 4, 6, 49, 118, 119, 122, 123, on, cross-disciplinary, 44
140 literacy-based foreign language teaching, 6,
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, B., 67 40–59; basic skills/cognitive skills, 45; vs.
Klier, J. D., 152 communicative language teaching, 40–
Kohonen, Viljo, 133 42, 46–47; cultural context, importance
Koike, Y., 4 of, 46, 47–48; current limitations on, 45–
Kötter, M., 122 47; curriculum, goals of, 50–52, 51; cur-
Kramsch, Claire, 2, 5, 40, 47, 120, 121, 128 riculum, sequence of instruction in, 52–
Kramsch, O., 2, 40 53, 53, 54; definition of, sociocognitive,
Krueger, M., 4 48–49; definitions of, variable, 43–45;
Kuczaj, S., 66 educators’ call for, 47–48; foreign cul-
tural literacy, 47–48; high cultural
Lam, W. S. E., 121 strand, 45; integration, lack of, 119–20;
language play, 66–68, 72. See also poetic introductory vs. advanced curricula, 40,
function 43, 45–46, 48, 119, 121; learner needs, 50;
languages, uncommonly taught, 6, 99–117; learners’ role, 53–57, 57; literature in, 51;
 Index 177

oppositional reading, 120; pluralistic lit- native speakers: and authentic language,
eracy, 47; principles of literacy as com- 61–62; as a class-based fiction, 120; and
munication, 49–50; and the privilege of proficiency standards, 119
the non-native speaker, 120, 121; reflect- natural language, 61–62
ing, 56–57; responding, 55; revising, 55– NBLT (network-based language teaching),
56; scope of, 43; standards, defining, 46, 118
119; teachers’ role, 53–57, 57; text-centric negotiation of meaning, 65
view of, 45; the textual and the social, Nolden, Thomas, 120, 128
tension between, 121
literature, foreign: in interdisciplinary pro- Olson, D., 11
grams, 147–48; as language play, 67; in oppositional reading, 120
literacy-based curricula, 51; need for oral communication vs. written communi-
study of, 40–43 cation, 40–42. See also communicative
lower-level vs. upper-level curricula, 3; gap language teaching (CLT)
between, 40, 43, 45–46, 48, 119, 121 oral culture, 10–11, 12
Orchideenfächer, 144
Macedo, D., 43 Owens, R., 66
Makine, Andreï, 74–75 Oxyrhynchus community, 21–22
Making Communicative Language Teaching
Happen (Lee and VanPatten), 63 Parker, Dorothy, 65
Mandelblit, Nili, 33 Patrikis, Peter C., 2
Mann, Thomas, 123–27, 142n3 pattern practice, 69–71
maquiladoras, 165 Pennycook, A., 46
McLuhan, Marshall, 12 Perez-Firmat, Gustavo, 165
metalingual function, 64, 65 phatic function, 64, 65, 66. See also poetic
Metamorphosis (Kafka), 152 function
Miller, K., 12 play: language play, 66–68, 72; role-playing, in
Montesinos, Fr. Antonio, 163 the MOO, 132–35. See also poetic function
Monville-Burston, M., 64 pluralistic literacy, 47
MOO (Multi-user domain, object ori- poetic function, 6, 60–73; in adult lan-
ented), 6, 118–43; access to, 141n2; bene- guage, 67–68; in child language, 66–67;
fits of, 138–41; circular reading in, 135– communication, purposes of, 63–66; de-
38; collaborative reading in, 123–27; de- fined by Jakobson, 62, 63–64, 65–66;
fined and described, 122; experiential Focus-on-Form movement, 68–69; in
reading in, 127–35; Mann’s ‘‘Im Spiegel,’’ grammar instruction, 68–69, 71; and
123–27, 142n3; for reading in low-level language play, 66–68, 72; need for, in
curricula, 121, 122, 140, 141; role-playing language teaching, 68; and repetition
in, 132–35; rooms, exits from, 136–38; method, 69–71; songs, use of, 61; the
rooms, reading and writing in, 128–32; speech event, functions of, 64–66
shapes the literacy community, 122; and politics. See foreign language study, ethics in
vocabulary-building, 127 Prague School, 63–64
Mori, Yoshiro, 102, 103, 107–8, 109–11. Prévert, Jacques, 60–61
See also languages, uncommonly privilege of the non-native speaker, 120, 121
taught Process, Der (Kafka), 151
Mueller, Marlies, 47 prose styles, blending in, 34–37
178 Index

reading: as active skill, 5; cognitive process Teaching and Assessing Intercultural Com-
in, 15–16; on computer screens, 15–17; municative Competence (Byram), 93
demise of, as fallacy, 2–4, 12–13; as social technology, as agent of change, 10, 11–13.
phenomenon, 9–10, 123 See also computer use
reading culture, 5, 9–23; of classical antiq- Terrell, T. D., 41
uity, 13–15, 19; defined, 9–10; education, Testament français, Le (Makine), 74–75
Web-based, 18–19; and education, socio- testing standards, 46
cultural aspects of, 20–22; and the elec- Tex’s French Grammar, 71
tronic revolution, e√ect of, 10, 11–13, 15– textbooks, 4; for communicative language
17, 20–21; fallacies in analysis of, 10–13; teaching, 60–61, 63; and the Internet,
vs. oral culture, 10–11, 12; paradigm shift compared to, 113; for less commonly
in, 14–17; sociocultural construction of, taught languages, 113
13–14, 19–22 Thomas, F. N., 34, 35, 36
Reading for Meaning (Swa√ar, Arens, and Thomas, R., 11, 12
Byrnes), 47 Timberlake, A., 104
Reddy, M., 31 Timmerman, Jacobo, 164
referential language, 61, 63, 64 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 92
Roche, Jörg, 4, 125 transactional language, 61, 63, 64
Roman books, 14 translation, and metaphor, 145, 152, 155–56.
Rosenblatt, L. M., 41 See also Kafka courses, York University
rote learning, 69–71 Translator’s Invisibility, The (Venuti), 156
Rott, Susanne, 127 Trial, The (Kafka), 151
Ryan, F., 4 Turkle, Sherry, 132
Turner, E. G., 13
saccadic movement, 15–16 Turner, Mark, 5, 25, 34, 35, 36
Saenger, P., 11, 15
Salumets, T., 4 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 160
Savignon, S. J., 41
Saxena, M., 44 Valdman, A., 121
Schneider, Je√rey, 6, 122 VanLier, L., 61
Scribner, S., 44 VanPatten, B., 63
Sedgwick, Eve, 135 Venuti, Lawrence, 156
Shumway, Nicolas, 7 von der Emde, Silke, 6, 122
songs, use of, 61
speech event, functions of, 64–66 Wagner, D. A., 44
standards, measurable, 46 Warschauer, M., 118, 122
Street, B. V., 20 Waryn, Shoggy, 75
Sunderman, G., 2, 4 Watt, I., 11
Swa√ar, Janet, 5, 47, 119 Waugh, L. R., 63–64
Swain, M., 41 Webber, Mark J., 7, 125, 149, 155
Widdowson, Henry, 1, 47
Tannen, Deborah, 66, 69 Williams, J., 68, 121
teachers, view of: in apprenticeship model, Wingo, E. O., 14
53–54; as authorities, 54; in literacy- Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1
based curricula, 53–57 World Wide Web. See Internet education