The Personal World of the Language Learner

THE PERSONAL
WORLD OF THE
LANGUAGE
LEARNER
Cristina Ros i Solé
The Personal World of the Language Learner
The Personal World

of the Language
Learner
King’s College London
United Kingdom
The Open University

United Kingdom
ISBN 978-1-137-52852-0 ISBN 978-1-137-52853-7 (eBook)

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-52853-7
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016958109
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To Klaus, Luke and Lee
Foreword
“Language learners may not follow a straight route or path, but may get
caught in circular paths and loops, in unexpected directions, forming
complex networks.”
In his book Lines: A Brief History the Anthropologist Tim Ingold main-
tains that we have left the ground and turned place into space, into occu-
pying structures, rather than singly and together, producing our own lives
(Ingold 2007). He calls for an alternative account of working with not
doing to. In this he is influenced by the distinction made by Deleuze and
Guattari (Deleuze and Guattari 1988) between what they term ‘lines of
flight’ and ‘lines of becoming’. Ingold develops the idea of lines of becom-
ing into lines of inhabitions, wayfaring and story-telling which move along
and through the world, rather than skimming its surface.
For decades the paradigms, born of positivism, which have dominated
language pedagogy have been shaped by concepts and theories which
accord most fully with building on the surface and ‘doing language to’
learners rather than working with their already rich histories and resources
of inhabitation in a languaged world. Scholars have worked to critique
and also find ways of describing ways in which language learning might
indeed become more of an activity of moving along and through the
world, rather than acquiring credit from the surface. Claire Kramsch, in
particular in The Multilingual Subject, develops a clear, theoretical outline
of how such a shift in focus might be accomplished (Kramsch 2009). In
our book Modern Languages: Learning and Teaching in an Intercultural
Field (Phipps and Gonzalez 2004) we laid out a critical shape for language
vii
viii Foreword
people for language learning between classroom and their daily experi-
ences of habitation.
Cristina Ros i Solé’s work offers this nascent work something special—a
clear, personal account of the lines of inhabition, the messy ways of liv-
ing in languages as experience by the ‘multilingual subject’. Her work is
delightful in that it exudes life and hope and loveliness coupled with care-
ful research, thought—in its deepest sense—and theoretical consideration
of how language learning might be less about ‘lines of flight’ and more
about ‘lines of becoming’ and of ‘inhabition’. The chapters luxuriate in
the life of language people and the often quirky, humorous but above
all materially ‘real’ experiences of their personal lives and worlds lived in
languages.
In my view, and in that of Ros i Solé throughout this book and in its
conclusion, language learning is an art. In my own work (Phipps 2007)
the arts of language learning were central to the interpretation of the
material I garnered in working with tourists and in language learning
myself. Themes of gift, rehearsal, the social bond, feast and theatre, of the
ludic and the liminal were central to my own attempts to understand the
personal in language learning. Here in this book we find such a discourse
from the arts strengthened and deepened with concepts drawn back into
a renewed humanities focus on language pedagogy.
Perhaps this book represents another moment in a renewed step
towards arts and humanities perspectives on language learning and lan-
guage pedagogy. Long understood as the Cinderella of Modern Language
programmes, where literary texts dominated, language pedagogy, applied
linguistics and second language acquisition have worked within social sci-
entific, educational paradigms and eschewed their close relatives in liter-
ary disciplines, other than perhaps as ‘material’ for teaching and research.
What Ros i Solé does, with a gentleness in her scholarly tone, is to woo
back the arts to the social scientific, making room again for a poetic tone
in our considerations and scholarship in the field.
References
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1988). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizo-
phrenia. London: Athlone.
Ingold, T. (2007). Lines: A brief history. London: Routledge.
Kramsch, C. (2009). The multilingual subject. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Foreword ix
Phipps, A. (2007). Learning the arts of linguistic survival: Languaging, tourism,

life. Clevedon: Channel View.
Phipps, A., & Gonzalez, M. (2004). Modern languages: Learning and teaching in
an intercultural field. London: Sage.
Professor of Languages and Intercultural Studies Alison Phipps

University of Glasgow
Acknowledgements
This book is indebted to all the ‘language people’ I have learned from over
the years.
But above all I would like to thank Marie Noëlle Lamy for her gener-
osity, constant encouragement and help at different stages of the project.
To Jane Fenoulhet, Gerdi Quist and Christine Sas at University College
London for sharing with me their wisdom and progressive thinking on
language pedagogy. My heartfelt thanks go to many of my friends and col-
leagues who have made time in their busy lives to read and comment on
parts of this book: Constant Leung, Jane Fenoulhet, Marie Noëlle Lamy,
Constadina Charalambous, John Gray and Brian Street.
My gratitude also goes to my friends and colleagues at the Open
University, with whom I learned how learners do most of the work. Also
to my friends and colleagues at SOAS and SSEES-UCL for widening my
knowledge and sensibility to different languages and the rich ways of teach-
ing, learning and living them. I would also like to thank my colleagues at
King’s College London who have constantly enriched my understanding
of how language is used.
And a special thanks goes to my friends Elaine Golding, María Iturri
and Adrian Voce for their enthusiasm for this project and their help in
shaping my ideas at different stages of the process.
xi
Contents
1 Introduction: From Sense to Sensibility 1
2 Humanising Language Learning 13
3 Lines of Thought 29
4 Identity Reimagined 47
5 Brave New Lifeworlds 71
6 The Social Promise of Emotions 95
7 Life in a Caravan 119
8 Conclusion: The Arts of Language Learning 137
Learners’ Information143
Index145
xiii
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: From Sense to Sensibility
Abstract The development of Modern Foreign Languages (MFL)

pedagogy and English Language Teaching (ELT) has been built on a
Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) ideology that, on the one
hand, has not provided sufficient knowledge on the socio-cultural aspects
of language learning and its socialisation processes, and, on the other, has
limited the ways in which individuals can build on their most personal,
emotional and creative needs. Within this state of affairs, mainstream
psychological and cognitive approaches to Second Language Acquisition
(SLA) and CLT methodologies have prevented a vision of the language
learner that invokes humanistic ideals and the development of the self.
This book argues for a change in the direction of language teaching
towards a language pedagogy that focuses on the personal aspects of the
language learning experience and the possibilities it affords for the trans-
formation of the self. This view of language learning claims that languages
and cultures are not abstract and timeless phenomena; rather, it claims
that languages come in different versions and sizes to fit the bodies of their
owners and their circumstances. According to this view, languages are not
only ‘acquired’ and ‘learnt’, but also ‘lived’.
Keywords Modern Foreign Languages • English Language Teaching

• Communicative Language Teaching • Socio-cultural • Emotional
• Creative • Personal transformation
© The Author(s) 2016 1

C. Ros i Solé, The Personal World of the Language Learner,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-52853-7_1
2 C. ROS I SOLÉ
When I was at primary school my teacher told me I should not read so

many fairy tales. I did not listen. To me fantasy was much more interest-
ing than reality. I was a dreamer. As I grew up, languages became my
new fairy tales. They allowed me to go armchair travelling, to escape and
leave the familiar behind. Of course, it has not all been plain sailing. At
times, speaking other languages has made me invisible. I did not fit in. I
was not recognised or easily pigeonholed. The sort of language speaker
and language learner I embodied was not represented in the mainstream.
But I was not interested in becoming ‘English’ or conforming to an ideal.
I didn’t want to declare my new sense of identity to belong to any of
the available categories either: Catalan, Spanish, Black, White, Caucasian,
European, British. How does one talk about one’s cultural identity? I did
not feel comfortable in any of the ‘skins’ available to me. I wanted to cre-
ate something different, a new ‘me’.
I did not want to take residence in a foreign land but in a wonderland
where I could taste magic new sounds, enact mysterious social rituals and
enjoy beautiful and bizarre new vistas. But I was told that before get-
ting to know the culture, before socialising and creating my own worlds,
I needed to sweep floors, tidy up the house. I was told to learn phrasal
verbs, vocabulary, do gap-fill exercises, to read the great and the good,
Dante Alighieri, William Shakespeare, Arabic texts from the Al-Andalus.
I was told to pretend to be someone else, not me. ‘Let’s do a ‘role-play’,
teachers would say, ‘let’s do a group task, this will expose you to the right
kind of language and then without much effort will make you fluent in the
language’. I did not engage with it and watched with envy and resignation
as the ugly step sisters were allowed to go somewhere else, to dreamland.
Never me. I studied hard, but my heart was not in it. I could not feel any-
thing; my heart was frozen.
Finally, I resolved to revel in and inject the English language with my
own life and my own fiction. I resolved to create a wonderland where I
could realise my personal dreams, a place where I could figure out different
versions of ‘me’. A place where I could use linguistic incantations, spells
and powers to create new personal worlds. I could finally ‘take flight’.
Let’s now fast forward to twenty-first-century England. Things have
not changed much. Today, language learners are still told not to believe in
fairy tales. They are told that languages are essential and advantageous for
travelling, for getting a better job, passing an exam or being able to better
understand or get closer to relatives or friends. They are told that they may
also learn a new language because they want to fulfil a long-held dream
INTRODUCTION: FROM SENSE TO SENSIBILITY 3
of inhabiting another language or sounding like someone else. But many

language learners are and should be more ambitious than this; they should
follow a personal fantasy, an alternative and subversive world.
Language learning allows us to connect with the world in new ways
by rebelling against the long-held belief that we are born and die with
the same cultural identity. This book argues for this empowering agenda
for the language learner, one that looks into the creation of personal
worlds which do not fit political and national boundaries of cultures and
languages, and the upholding of linguistic standards. Instead this vision
drops old national labels to allow the learner to explore new horizons, new
ways of belonging to other languages and cultures, and new ways of dwell-
ing in them. Learners embark on personal journeys where they draw their
own cartographies of the world which use the force of perception, affect
and creativity to experience and fashion new road-maps of the world and
new interpretations. This view of language learning claims that languages
and cultures are not forever; they come in different versions and sizes to fit
the bodies of their owners and their circumstances, and they are not only
‘acquired’ and ‘learnt’, but also ‘lived’.
In order to develop such an understanding of language learning this
book presents a radical turn in Second Language Acquisition (SLA) by
introducing a view of language learning that challenges rationalist, instru-
mental and empiricist approaches to language learning theory. It argues
for an understanding of language learning that moves away from looking
at it as something that can be isolated and studied out of context to look-
ing at the interpretative and complex processes involved in the fashioning
of new cultural worlds and new multilingual identities.
The Personal World of the Language Learner argues for different pur-
poses and goals for language learning that heralds a change of focus in
additional language education, one that distances itself from an approach
to language teaching that has an orientation to the job market and other
instrumental and goal-oriented paradigms that came with the develop-
ment of Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) and its utilitarian
ideology. Indeed, the spread of a particular version of Communicative
Competence and CLT, first to English Language Teaching (ELT) and
then to Modern Languages (ML), developed into a language pedagogy
model that focused on the transactional, the transfer of information that
linked language learning to career opportunities and the expansion of
global exchange of economic and cultural capital (Block 2002; Kramsch
2005). Despite the fact that the theorisation of communicative compe-
4 C. ROS I SOLÉ
tence was based on more socio-cultural and ethnographic understandings

of language and communication, first advanced by M.A.K. Halliday’s and
Dell Hymes’ writings in the 1970s, these were not taken up by mainstream
versions of CLT and its interpretations of Communicative Competence
(Leung 2005, 2010). Instead, the more pragmatic and instrumental inter-
pretations gained ground in the prevailing definitions of Communicative
Competence.
As a result, the development of Modern Languages and English
Language Teaching has been built on a CLT ideology that on the one
hand has not provided sufficient for the socio-cultural aspects of language
learning and its socialisation processes, and on the other has limited the
ways in which individuals could build on their most personal, emotional
and creative needs. Within this state of affairs, mainstream psychological
and cognitive approaches to SLA and CLT methodologies have prevented
a vision of the language learner who invokes humanistic ideals with his/
her development of the self and the construction of personal language
learning projects. This book argues for a change in the direction of lan-
guage teaching towards a language pedagogy that focuses on the develop-
ment and transformation of the self.
The increased attention on the subject of identity and emotion in
language learning (e.g., Benesch 2012; Block 2007a, b; Dewaele 2010;
Kramsch 2009; Norton 2000; Pavlenko 2005) challenges theoretical
frameworks and epistemologies of language learning that are only begin-
ning to throw light on the language learning experience and the creation
of personally relevant linguistic and cultural worlds.
This book will use a original data and a review of the literature to illus-
trate a new theoretical framework that attempts to provide a paradigm for
the cultivation of the personal in language learning. The data discussed in
this book is taken from a study conducted over 12 months in 2008–2009,
and it comprises a rich collection of interviews and narratives of learners of
Arabic, Catalan and Serbian/Croatian.
The theoretical paradigm indicated above by points out new ways of
looking at data and claims new types of data for SLA research. In order to
illustrate this I will draw on my own data set as well as examples from liter-
ary sources. This will be done in order to discuss and argue for the need
of new theoretical tools to better explain the language learning experience
from the point of view of language learners’ subjectivities and intersubjec-
tivities. For the reader who is interested in methodological issues, see Ros
i Solé (2012). Below, I give a summary of the ideas presented throughout
the six chapters that make up this volume.
Chapter 2, ‘The Humanisation of Language Learning’, argues for a

radical shift in SLA and language learning pedagogy research. In spite of
the fact that speaking an additional language has been long recognised
as a way to achieve personal fulfilment in language policy statements
(e.g., DfES 2002; CEFR 2001), humanistic and subjective perspectives
on language learning have been confined to the margins of the discipline
(see Kramsch 2002, 2009; Larsen-Freeman 1997; Phipps and González
2004, for exceptions). This chapter aims to shift the personal to the centre
ground of SLA by introducing more subjective and experiential perspec-
tives to language learning as an alternative and yet key component of SLA
research.
It argues that SLA’s pro-Enlightenment epistemological approach, so
far dominant in the field, has favoured a view of language learning as a
mechanistic and atomised process which underplays holistic, symbolic and
experiential views of language learning. Instead, a humanistic orientation
to SLA calls for holistic approaches that see the learner as a whole being
rather than the sum of his/her parts , whilst favouring methodologies that
present detailed and thick descriptions within emic stances, such as the
use of ethnography and narratives. Such an approach also necessitates a
shift from rationalistic and empiricist methodologies to phenomenologi-
cal frameworks, which place the emphasis of the research enquiry on the
search for meanings and essences and the wholeness of experience, rather
than on measurements of isolated phenomena and their components
(Mustakas 1994).
Chapter 3, ‘Lines of Thought’, contends that SLA needs to go beyond
the purely linguistic in the communicative experience by uncovering the
so far obscured personal and experiential dimensions of language learning.
In order to do this, I argue that a new theoretical kit is needed. This chap-
ter will draw on philosophical thought to throw light on this unchartered
terrain in order to construct more complex and richer understandings of
the subject as a sentient, agentive and creative human being. In such a
view, and in contrast to the linearity of more rationalistic approaches to
the subject, language learning is seen as a subversive stance on the self:
as a way of taking risks, and multiple and non-linear paths of develop-
ment. Philosophical schools of thought that take such a complex con-
ceptualisation of the subject will be invoked in order to throw light on
this malleable but fractured self: a subject-in-progress. I will first discuss
the concept of Bildung proposed by Wilhelm von Humboldt, a German
nineteenth-century philosopher and educational reformer who believed
6 C. ROS I SOLÉ
that education’s main goal was that of placing the cultivation of one’s
‘character’ at the centre of the educational experience, and taken up by
Byram (2010) and recent studies on language learning and citizenship
(Osler and Starkey 2015). Closely related to Bildung’s affirmation of the
self is the Romantic moment’s concern with the more affective and creative
approach to the subject. Romantics’ zest for going beyond the immedi-
ate and observable reality to look into themselves and access unconscious
forces (Abrams 1953), will be used as a metaphor for a language learner’s
propensity to use the additional language to give free rein to their expres-
sive powers and imaginations.
Whereas previous approaches to language learning constructed the
motivation of the language learner around a specific purpose, this chapter
will challenge such an assumption by contending that languages can also be
experienced for the pleasure of it. Borrowing from the philosophical school
of Aestheticism, it will argue that language learning can be seen as a purely
aesthetic experience, ‘art for art’s sake’. Languages may be learnt with no
specific purpose or rewards in mind, even if the language learning endeav-
our risks being misunderstood as a purposeless activity and ‘a luxury’. This
aesthetic approach to language learning throws new light into the personal
worlds of the language learner by privileging the sensations, the impres-
sions and the imaginaries one can experience in another language. So, pay-
ing attention to the aesthetic in language learning can be seen as a personal
disposition that turns the intercultural and linguistic encounter into a sen-
sual event and a leisurely activity. This is best expressed by using the wan-
dering figure of the flâneur as a metaphor for language learning. The figure
of the flâneur was introduced in the nineteenth century in the writings of
Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin. By imagining language learners
as twenty-first-century flâneurs, they acquire a new perspective and lens
onto the world that frees them from the pragmatic dictates of CLT and
SLA and pre-packaged versions of languages and cultures.
If the self-reflection of Bildung, the heightened awareness of subjectiv-
ity of the Romantics, and the leisured approach of Aestheticism develop
key aspects for a more humanised language learning, nomadic philosophy
(Braidotti 1994) helps us recast language learners’ identities as creative
and subversive. Being a ‘nomad’ does not refer to the literal act of trav-
elling, but to the subverting of a set of conventions that will define the
nomadic state. By learning a new language, language learners engage in
myth-making and the challenging of their habitual intellectual surround-
ings and usual conventions.
Finally, I will draw on phenomenological philosophy and its theory of

perception. Like Nomadism, the phenomenological approach to language
negates the independence of mental life and stresses the importance
of highlighting the experiential aspects of language by bringing in the
body and its primary experience at the forefront of how we understand
language. But phenomenological thought (Merleau-Ponty 1945) goes
further in implicating the senses and how we perceive reality. Language
becomes perception, and the language learning experience becomes key
in this process.
Chapter 4, ‘Identity Reimagined’, discusses the importance of looking
at the subject as a temporary ‘figuration’, one that comes as a result of the
world of possibility and transformative powers that fractured and multiple
identities bring about. It looks at the different kinds of ‘me’ that learning
new languages allows us to be. But before delving into this understanding
of identity it reviews recent identity approaches in SLA that see the iden-
tity of the language learner either as a place of struggle (Norton 2000),
as a reflection for the self (Pavlenko 2001, 2002) or as a product of the
imagination and symbolic thought (Kramsch 2009). The conceptualisa-
tion of the ‘personal in SLA’ I present here aims at contributing to these
discussions by bringing them together and adding something new. I will
propose a ‘figurations’ approach to identity, which draws on nomadic phi-
losophy and anthropological approaches to the subject (Braidotti 1994;
Holland et al. 2001). Unlike the post-structuralist approach to ‘identity’
that saw it as a state of discomfort and ambivalence (Block 2007b), the
nomadic idea of ‘figurations’ introduces a non-linear path to the iden-
tity of the language learner, one that emphasises the contingency and the
positive force that fractured identities bring to the self. In this conceptu-
alisation of identity, it is the language learner and his/her contemporaries
who will contribute to creating the structures and the networks through
which the life of the language learner will develop. Such a view connects
the learner with what others think and how they value the world; in other
words, it creates an intersubjective and empathic view of the world.
Chapter 5, ‘Brave New Lifeworlds’, argues that a humanised view to
language learning cannot neglect the fact that learners not only construct
identities and figurations for themselves in the additional language, but
also that these are constituted by and constitutive of their personal worlds.
I describe language learners’ personal worlds through the phenomeno-
logical concept of lifeworld proposed by Husserl (1936/1970), a concept
that denotes a different understanding of the language learner’s sense of
8 C. ROS I SOLÉ
self and his/her place and ownership of a multilingual world. Such an

understanding of the language learners’ personal worlds indicates that
their lived experiences are more autonomous and unpredictable that has
been previously accounted for. Linguistic and cultural lives become con-
tingent on the locality and the terrains on which the learner treads, which
in turn, becomes a deterritorialised experience of language learning. In
order to explore these lifeworlds, I draw on the notion of Spracherleben
(the lived experience of language) (Busch 2014) based on a phenome-
nological approach to the subject which emphasises the primacy of per-
ception over reason, the link between body and mind and the concept
of ‘body memory’. This will be done by the illustration of Spracherleben
of learners of Serbian/Croatian, Catalan and Arabic who provide vivid
accounts of their experiences of living these languages.
Chapter 6, ‘The Social Promise of Emotions’, challenges how affect
has traditionally been viewed in SLA, where it is seen as a ‘filter’ that
determines success or failure at language learning. Instead, it presents a
conceptualisation of emotions that distances itself from the cognitive and
neurobiological view that sees them as mechanical reactions and apprais-
als of situations. And presents an understanding of the emotions experi-
enced by the language learner where emotions are seen as an embodied
and creative experience that allows the individual to experiment with
their views of themselves and of the world. Emotions become the key to
unlocking language learners’ inner worlds through social engagement in
the new situations of the additional language. This is a reconceptualisa-
tion of emotions that builds on the work by critical language educator
Sarah Benesch (2012), cultural theorist Sarah Ahmed (2004) and linguist
Margaret Wetherell (2012). Such understandings of how emotions work
firmly places emotions on a social and embodied plane and implies an
approach to emotions that places social and perceptual aspects as cen-
tral. A social approach to emotions highlights the importance of society
in shaping our feelings and our agency in shaping and doing ‘emotion
work’. It proposes that in order to understand language learners’ feelings
we need to understand the circulation of feelings in society, how they are
appropriated and how they affect us. Emotions are not seen as inherent
of certain situations, or as personal projections onto new language learn-
ing situations, but rather they are shaped by the continuous dealings in
the sociality of the additional language. Such a view will be illustrated by
providing examples of objects that language learners use to shape their
emotions in their relationship with the new language and cultures.
Chapter 7, ‘Life in a Caravan’, describes language learners’ experi-

ences invoking the notion of ‘travel’ and nomadism. The use of a travel
metaphor for describing the experience of language learning is not new
(e.g.Cronin 2000; Kramsch and Von Hoene 2001; Phipps 2007). Indeed,
language learning has often been conveyed as imaginings of distant places
that evoke thoughts of happiness and exotic cultures, pilgrimages in search
of truth and mythical places (Ros i Solé and Fenoulhet 2011). From the
traditional search for utopian worlds and epiphanies of the life-long lan-
guage learner, language learning has been transformed into today’s func-
tional and instrumental agenda of the package holiday tourist: ‘buy the
ticket, order the meal, book the hotel’ (Cronin 2000: 19).
The possibility that the language learning experience could infuse
the learner with new moral meanings and aesthetic sensibilities, like the
Romantic traveller who gains access to imaginary spaces of personal libera-
tion (Gilroy 2000), travelling turns to be a fertile trope for looking at lan-
guage learners’ personal journeys. These personal forays take a myriad of
forms and shapes, from the long-life journey to the ‘quick tourist encoun-
ter’ (Phipps 2007). The travelling metaphor I discuss in this chapter goes
beyond the shortening of geographical distances, to signal the complex
web of personal stories and desires that are inscribed into particular lan-
guage learners’ experiences.
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London: Sage.
CHAPTER 2
Humanising Language Learning
Abstract This chapter argues for a radical shift in Second Language

Acquisition (SLA) and language learning pedagogy research. It aims to
shift the personal to the centre ground of SLA by introducing more subjec-
tive and experiential perspectives to language learning as an alternative and
yet key component of SLA research. Whilst pro-Enlightenment epistemo-
logical approaches currently dominant in SLA have so far favoured a view
of language as a mechanistic and atomised process, a humanistic orienta-
tion to SLA calls for the use of holistic approaches that see the learner as
a whole being rather than the sum of his/her parts. It maintains that this
alternative paradigm for SLA also necessitates a shift from rationalistic and
empiricist methodologies to phenomenological frameworks, which place
the emphasis of research on the search for meanings and essences and the
wholeness of experience, rather than on measurements of isolated phe-
nomena and their components (Mustakas, C. (1994). Phenomenological
Research Methods. London: Sage).
Keywords Personal • Experiential • Subjective • Second Language

Acquisition (SLA) • Enlightenment • Phenomenology • Language
learning

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-52853-7_2
14 C. ROS I SOLÉ
The discipline of Second Language Acquisition and the humanities have

rarely made happy companions. But despite the fact that Second Language
Acquisition (SLA) and language education have in the past used theoreti-
cal frameworks from philosophy, anthropology, cultural studies and lit-
erature to provide key insights into the role of identity, culture and the
development of cosmopolitantrajectories in language learning, these have
just begun to build a view of the language subject grounded on con-
temporary understandings of the learner as a human being (Dervin and
Risager 2014; Holliday 2011; Kramsch 2009; Phipps 2007). As a result,
learners’ complex worlds are still kept in the shadows and are rendered
invisible.
Since the birth of SLA in the 1960s, language learning research has
been dominated by an approach that is built on psychological, cognitive,
neurobiological and linguistic understandings of language. In this chap-
ter, I will radically depart from this understanding of language learning
by going beyond the linguistic in SLA. Instead, I will reclaim a new role
for the subject in second language learning by exploring the centrality of
the learners’ reflexivity, affectivity and perception in the language learning
experience.
At the centre of SLA’s linguistic approach to language learning is the
long-term commitment to a positivist project that values reason, scientific
method and the belief that empirical sciences are the way forward. This
has been exacerbated by an emphasis on uncritical empirical methods,
rather than on a coherent and theoretical apparatus that ensures a sound
grounding in the nature of language and learning (McNamara 2015).
One of the consequences of the hegemony of rationalism and the use of
scientific methods from the social and life sciences in SLA has been that it
has prevented or relegated the use of critical analysis from the humanities
to second place and has focused on the creation of knowledge through
an empiricist school of thought. The cornerstone of such an approach is
the collection and measurement of relevant data. As Norris and Ortega
(2008: 717) put it: ‘Research within the social and cognitive sciences fre-
quently calls upon measurement to provide a systematic means for gather-
ing evidence about human behaviours, such that they may be interpreted
in theoretically meaningful ways.’
Such an approach favours a view of language learning as a mechanistic
and atomised process and underplays holistic, symbolic and experiential
views of language learning that adopt humanistic orientations and meth-
odologies, such as the use of ethnography, narratives and interpretative
HUMANISING LANGUAGE LEARNING 15
methods, to study ‘the complexity of the human experience and the

emphasis on looking at the past, stories and ideas’ (Bates 2011: 2). Instead,
this book will propose an approach to the subject and a methodology
that focuses on a human sciences research agenda. Such an approach is
best summarised by an emphasis on ‘searching for meanings and essences
of experience rather than measurements and explanations’ and ‘focusing
on the wholeness of experience rather than solely on its objects of parts’
(Mustakas 1994: 21).
In spite of the fact that speaking an additional language has long been
recognised as a way to achieve personal fulfilment by educational man-
agers and language policies (e.g., DfES 2002; CEFR 2001), the study
of language learning from a humanistic and subjective perspective has
been confined to the margins of the discipline (see Kramsch 2002, 2009,
Larsen-Freeman 1997 for exceptions). This has meant that alternative
approaches that have looked at language learning through a ‘human’ lens
have often appeared under a new discipline, that of intercultural studies.
The trajectory of ‘intercultural communication’ (and intercultural com-
municative competence) in language learning has developed as a paral-
lel rather than an integral component of SLA and has mostly developed
under the auspices of language education.
Even though in the last decade there have been attempts to widen the
remit of SLA and language pedagogy by bringing in socio-cultural aspects
and interdisciplinary approaches such as ‘the social turn’ (Block 2003), the
‘critical turn’ (Pennycook 2001; Phipps and Guilherme 2004; Gray 2013)
and the ‘multilingual turn’ (May 2014), these have positioned themselves
within the umbrella discipline of ‘applied linguistics’ rather than within
SLA. In SLA itself, Chomskian linguistic and psychologically oriented
SLA still reigns supreme. Even when we talk about Applied Linguistics in
general, as McNamara (2015) has recently pointed out, there seems to be
a need for further engagement with the humanities:
We need an engagement or re-engagement with discussions of language in

the humanities, given that it is where arguably the most interesting discus-
sions of language have taken place in the last 50 years. Of course, applied
linguists whose focus is on a broad range of social issues with a critical or
ameliorist purpose have drawn on this work for many years, but not coher-
ently […] To fully appreciate the challenge represented by poststructuralism
would be a revolutionary change for Applied Linguistics. This seems to me
the most important challenge currently facing us. (p. 475)
16 C. ROS I SOLÉ
Language Education, however, has developed in a different direction.

Indeed, it has drawn on anthropology, cultural studies, philosophical
thought and contemporary feminist theory in order to reflect about lan-
guage learning and the role of the subject within it. From the educa-
tional ideas of Humbolt (1793/1794/2000), the sociologically oriented
thought of Bourdieu (1991), the use of phenomenological philosophy
in the works of Merleau-Ponty (2012), to Bahktin (1981) we have seen
a variety of philosophical lenses applied to language learning. We have
also seen some incursions into more contemporary anthropologists such
as Holland and Leave (2000), as well as discussions around the move-
ment of English as a lingua franca either through globalisation theories
(see Dewey and Jenkins 2010) or, more critically, by engaging with the
Frankfurt School critical theory (see O’Regan 2014).
Cross-pollination with theorisation in other disciplines can also be
found in the educational philosophy underpinning critical pedagogy
applied to English Language Teaching (ELT) (see Gray 2013), the chal-
lenges of post-structuralism for applied linguistics (see McNamara 2012)
or the integration of feminist thought, such as Irigaray (see Phipps 2007,
2010) and Weedon’s view of subjectivity applied to the construction of
identity in the learning of a second language (see Norton 2000). Given
these recent theoretical and epistemological approaches, it is time for a
reappraisal of the philosophical foundations of SLA by questioning the
appropriateness of the rationalist project of the Enlightenment to account
for the whole SLA edifice.
Moving on from Enlightenment Rationalism

The universe of additional language learners calls for a new paradigm that
is fit for the purpose of the philosophical and ontological questions that
address not only language learning as an internalised process, but also lan-
guage learning as practices lived outside and at the boundaries of the body.
Here, we refer to the intercultural encounter and the personal spaces that
are created between language and the self, the symbolic spaces in language
learning (Kramsch 2009), the ‘languaging’ of the lived experience (Phipps
2007) and the cosmopolitan lifeworlds drawn by language learners (Ros i
Solé 2013; Coffey 2010; Leung and Scarino 2016).
A repurposing of language learning for personal development and aes-
thetic orientations is gaining ground in language education circles (Kramsch
2009; Leung and Scarino 2016). Indeed, whilst the Enlightenment SLA
was underpinned by a modernist philosophy and a rationalist project that

was guided by its belief that progress and liberation were to be achieved
through an adequate use of reason and ‘new forms of scientific legitima-
tion and new modes of discourses that go with it’ (Braidotti 1994: 96), a
humanistic language learning shuns this ideal transcendentalism to value
more experiential and contingent approaches.
This transcendentalism is not only apparent in SLA’s emphasis on the
cognitive capabilities of the individual and the pursuance of an ‘ideal set
of objective language knowledge’, but also on the universal instrumen-
talist goals and purposes established by the so far dominant ideology in
language teaching; that is, Communicative Language Teaching and its
language education policy arm, the Council of Europe Framework of
Reference (Ros i Solé 2012; Leung and Scarino 2016).
Instead, the humanisation project I propose here focuses on creat-
ing a new philosophical toolkit to tackle the multiple, fluid and complex
worlds of possibility that today’s additional language learner encounters.
In particular, such a project will throw light on the key role of subjectivity,
intersubjectivity, perception and the use of affect as central to language
learners’ practices. Such a proposal will invoke the emergence of new
forms of scientific legitimation and new ways of viewing language learn-
ing, where the subject is no longer seen as an exclusively rational subject
that progresses on a chronological line of linear paths; rather, it draws a
picture where the learner appears in a network of multiple trails.
I will argue that by invoking personal reflection over objective reason,
experience over referential meaning, and the linking of mind and body,
such a humanising project does not only build on the more recent founda-
tions of poststructuralist and postmodernist philosophy but will also feed
on past philosophical schools that valued anti-Enlightenment approaches
to the subject. The philosophical approaches I am referring to make use
of the imagination and the power of the mind for the development and
the expression of the self, such as the educational philosophy of Bildung
(Humboldt 1793/1794/2000), the insights of the Romantic movement
(Abrams 1953) and Aestheticism (Benjamin 1983).
Such incursions into eighteenth- and nineteenth-century schools of
thought will be contrasted with more recent philosophical thought from
the last century that has reclaimed similar personal and subjective themes
and concepts as being key to provide an analytic framework to discuss
issues pertinent to the humanities. In particular, I will focus on Nomadism
(Deleuze and Guattari 2004; Braidotti 1994) and Phenomenology
18 C. ROS I SOLÉ
(Mustakas 1994; Merleau-Ponty 2012). In doing this, the ‘humanising

project’ for language learning this book presents will point towards an
epistemological standpoint that grounds language learning in the humani-
ties, and finds a way of understanding the language learner as a person and
a human being.
Reuniting Body and Mind

Looking at language learning as a ‘human’ endeavour opens up new
avenues for looking at the challenges and rewards of language learning
for personal reflection and its transformative powers. This will challenge
the ideas underpinning the rationalist project of traditional SLA, which
has been interested in the ‘acquisition’ of second languages. Following
Krashen and Terrel (1983) distinction between ‘acquisition’ and ‘learn-
ing’, SLA has focused on information processing (Sharwood-Smith 1993)
or the effects of motivation on acquisition (Dornyei 2001), to mention
two of the areas that concern mainstream SLA. In such an approach, the
research focus is on the optimisation and the effectiveness of language
learning. In turn, this focus has also called on paradigms and epistemo-
logical stances from the life sciences, such as the isolation of variables and
the measuring and analysis of randomised data. While widening its scope
of enquiry by looking into aspects of language learning such as identity
and emotions, SLA is still leaning on the empirical sciences such as psy-
chology and neurosciences for inspiration and guidance. So that when
SLA has strayed into the territory of the language learners’ mind, it has
kept its epistemological and ontological stances firmly in the precepts of
the Enlightenment, which conceived body and mind as two separate enti-
ties. The mind is seen as an ‘organ’ that is independent from the body.
Whilst discussing complex areas such as emotions, identity and motiva-
tion, cognitivist and psychological approaches to SLA have granted the
mind autonomy from and control over the body. In this approach, minds
are separate and disconnected from our bodies, and minds alone explain
our feelings, our decisions and our sense of self in language learning (e.g.,
Dornyei 2001; Dewaele 2005; Schumann 1977, 1998).
Instead, I will argue for another methodological and epistemological
view of the subject to investigate the personal aspects of SLA. This will
concentrate on a sense of what ‘personal worlds’ language learners make
and are made of, and the forces that drive and form these experiences. In
order to do this, I will bring a phenomenological approach that challenges
the rational project of the Enlightenment, with the language learning

experience appearing as firmly anchored in the perceptual, the emotional
and the aesthetic.
In doing this I wish to present a language learning research paradigm
based on human sciences research that in turn is based on subjectivity, a
way of investigating the world that values the personal and the reflective,
the intuited and the imagined, and where the language learning experi-
ence is ‘unjudged’ by the rational mind. As Mustakas explains (1994: 27):
The challenge facing the human sciences is to describe things in themselves,

to permit what is before one to enter consciousness and be understood in
its meanings and essences in the light of intuition and self-reflection. The
process involves a blending of what is really present with what is imagined
as present from the vantage point of possible meanings; thus a unity of the
real and the ideal.
(Mustakas 1994: 27)
We are now urged to ask exciting new questions, such as: Is the addi-
tional language a fertile ground for experimenting with and developing
our feelings and emotions? In what ways does language learning fuel our
imagination as well as exercise our reason? Is our personal cartography and
world-making shaped by language learning?
Indeed, educators in second language learning have been pointing
towards the need for a shift of emphasis in SLA and a need for a repurposing
of language education that allows for a more humanised language learn-
ing, which does not only take on board an ‘educational’ project such as
was done in intercultural communication and the development of citizen-
ship (Byram 2008) but also places self-cultivation and self-improvement at
the centre of SLA goals (Lantolf 2015; Leung and Scarino 2016). Applied
linguistics and SLA research have so far placed poststructuralism and post-
modern thought at the centre of discussions in SLA, but there is now a
need to cast the net wider by looking for alternative theorisations of the
subject within the humanities.
The challenging of the theoretical foundations of SLA and the call for
widening the focus of the remit of SLA has been a long time coming.
Almost two decades ago, Rampton (1997) questioned the purchase of
current philosophies of second language learning for our times of ‘late
modernity’. Among other things, he criticised the excessive concern of
SLA for language universals, its utilitarianism and its disregard for ideo-
logically aware approaches to language. Similarly, Phipps and Gonzalez
20 C. ROS I SOLÉ
(2004) pointed out flaws in current epistemologies of language learning.

They called for an effort to move away from positivist ideologies con-
cerned with performativity (here, understood as efficiency, skills and func-
tion) and the transmission of information, which were geared to cater
for the market place. They denounced what they called the ‘performative
turn’ in language learning that connected languages with disciplines such
as engineering or business studies, and thus functionalised languages by
linking them to the professional classes. Rather than the polyglot elite class
of bygone days, the leisured and the gentlemen scholars of the nineteenth
century who engaged in language learning as a way of sharpening the
intellect, in the twentieth and at the beginning of the twenty-first century,
language learners have been made to focus on very different goals. No
longer considered a gentleman, the twenty-first-century language learner
has been downgraded to an efficient professional who serves the market
economy and its neoliberal imperatives. Language learners are no lon-
ger viewed as independent thinkers, but are seen as pawns of the market
economy (Block et al. 2012; Gray 2013; Pérez-Milans 2014).
But before I embark on assessing how the humanities can be reclaimed
in order to address the life experiences of such a diverse and complex
world of language learners, I will review how this theoretical approach has
so far informed SLA research.
The Humanities in Current SLA Theory

Whilst, in general, the humanities have had little impact on mainstream
cognitive-based SLA, we can identify a much greater presence in social
approaches to SLA; for example, in the burgeoning fields of identity, inter-
cultural communication and multilingual and sociolinguistic approaches
to SLA.
A good example of such humanistic grounding is Norton’s (2000)
highly influential book on language learners’ identities, based on post-
structuralist thought and feminist theories of the subject. Similarly, Phipps
(2007) draws on phenomenological thought and its vision of the subject
as an embodied individual, and Kramsch’s (2009) book on multilingual
subjects crosses the boundaries between intercultural communication,
identity and multilingualism by arguing the symbolic nature of language
learning and drawing on psychoanalytic theory. A more socio-political
take is the one offered by Block, Gray and Holborow (2012) and Perez-
Milans (2014), who point out the influence of neoliberal ideology in ELT.
Such theoretical incursions have gone hand in hand with a different

set of methodologies. Indeed, cultural studies, anthropology and psycho-
analysis brought with them new methodologies, such as critical enquiry,
thematic analysis and critical discourse analysis, narrative analysis and lin-
guistic ethnography. Whereas Norton’s (2000) book was based on an
ethnographic study of several second language learner immigrant women
living in Canada, Phipps (2007) conducts an autoethnography of the
author’s tribulations as a student of Portuguese; and Kramsch’s study
(2009) uses self-reports and narrative data from language learners.
The study of language learning through the lens of the humanities has
not only brought with it new epistemologies and methodologies but also
new directions of research. So far, intercultural education, and language
education in general, have particularly benefited from a shift from prag-
matic objectives to an interest in the language learning experience and
personal development. This chapter argues that such a humanistic trans-
formative agenda should also be informing mainstream SLA.
Challenging the Remit and Scope of SLA

The view that I am presenting here not only presents a new paradigm for
language learning research, but also challenges the nature and scope of
knowledge in SLA.
The humanising project I argue for additional language learning
research departs from the now classic binary distinctions in SLA where
a clear distinction between ‘learning’ and ‘acquiring’ a language is being
made. Whereas in this approach ‘learning’ was to be taken as the conscious
and formal processing of language and ‘acquiring’ a second language
referred to the unconscious and naturalistic language learning (Krashen
and Terrel 1983), I will be arguing for a third avenue, the ‘experiencing’
of language learning, which moves away from the conscious/unconscious
distinction made by Krashen and Terrel in order to focus on the per-
sonal worlds made by the language learner in his/her intimate journeys
between the mind, the body and the social, and from the subjective to the
intersubjective . Such a change of emphasis will have several implications
for studying the experience of language learners and their subjectivity
through the following concepts: languaculture, new data, performativity,
intersubjectivity and the subject’s figurations, I will sketch out these five
aspects below:
22 C. ROS I SOLÉ
1. Languaculture: Such a concept signals a different conceptualisation

of language in SLA, one that establishes a close relationship between
language and culture, and one that sees them as two interrelated
concepts. This does not mean that language cannot be separated
from culture as a Romantic nationalist would have it (Risager 2005),
but that it is only by looking at language together with society and
culture that we can approach the subjectivity and intersubjectivity of
the learner in an experiential way.
Drawing on the work of anthropologist Michael Agar (1994),
Risager (2005) believes that the study of languaculture is concerned
with the study of meanings that language produces and carries
within it. In her definition, she identifies three dimensions within
languaculture, corresponding to three cultural perspectives on lan-
guage: the semantic and pragmatic potential; the poetic potential
and the identity potential. Whereas the first is interested in seman-
tics, and the constancy and variability within each language, the sec-
ond dimension refers to the potential of languaculture to create
meanings through phonological and syllabic structure of the lan-
guage. This would usually correspond to the studies on stylistics.
The third dimension is the one that this book is concerned with,
that of identity potential. According to Risager (ibid.), this is ‘related
to the social variation of the language in question: in using the lan-
guage in a specific way, with a specific accent for instance, you iden-
tify yourself and make it possible for others to identify you according
to their background knowledge and attitudes’ (p. 191). According
to this definition of languaculture, linguistic practice is not only
about language, but it is also about ‘acts of identity’ where individu-
als project their own understandings of the world and invite their
interlocutors to react to it.
As Risager (2005) explains, languaculture is not only grounded
in the structures of language, but it is susceptible to social and per-
sonal variables. It is the glue and the bridge between the structure
of the language and the ‘socially constituted personal ideolect’
(p. 191). She highlights the personal aspects of languaculture with
individual semantic connotations, and its potential for informing
accounts of language learning that value the life stories spoken, read
and written by the individual subject.
2. New data: If in the past sociolinguistic approaches to SLA have
raised the need to enlarge the database for language learning research
to include more naturalistic non-native to non-native interactions
(Firth and Wagner 1997), the focusing on the experiential in lan-

guage learning also raises new questions about language learners’
semantic worlds. Such an approach moves away from the nature of
SLA data, which has so far been welded to the production of
language. It argues that there can be another source of data besides
the purely linguistic one, one that tells us about learners’ experience
and perception of the language and culture at hand, which may
include silences, images, objects, reflections, feelings and actions.
3. Performativity. The focus here is not on efficient productivity of
linguistic forms, or even ‘use’ of language forms, as the term perfor-
mativity indicates in Phipps and González’s (2004) discussion.
Instead, the focus is on how the learner perceives and interprets the
intercultural and linguistic encounter and how this is enacted and
performed in the everyday life of the language learner, either lin-
guistically or otherwise (e.g., by entering a thought process or imag-
ined scenario).
4. Intersubjectivity. This concerns the subject’s interpretation of lan-
guage and culture in conjunction with others. Since the language is
not lodged in the brain, but ‘on the move’, socially and experien-
tially in interactions between society and the body, it is the intersub-
jective plane where an interpretation of the subject’s perceptions
and understandings of the culture will be located.
5. Figurations. An experiential approach to SLA would see the multi-
lingual subject as figurations. In contrast to traditional SLA, in this
humanising SLA project language learning is not seen any more as a
direct ‘by-product’ of teaching or exposure to the language, that is,
as ‘learning’ or ‘acquisition’, respectively (Krashen 1988), where the
learner’s agency and subjectivity has been omitted from the equa-
tion; but rather as a conscious and unconscious act, a wilful or
sensorial-affective response by the language learner who lives and
actively experiences the language. So language learning is not only
the ‘personally meaningless’ result of processing of information,
rules and prescribed language use; rather, language learning means
development and involves creativity by and of the subject in the
working of multiple ‘figurations’ and ‘heterogeneous ways of being’
that do not fit into current SLA discourses of the subject.
Within such an understanding of language learning, language learners are

not obliged to mimic and faithfully reproduce models of the language
learner subject constructed by SLA. Language learners are seen as having
24 C. ROS I SOLÉ
not only their own rational thoughts, but also as being able to engage
with their creativity and imagination. They are not linguistic ‘dupes’ who
mindlessly repeat the forms and meaning of the language and culture,
but engage in a creative and subversive use of the language. And with it,
they project their subjectivities. Language learners become creative agents
in the language learning process not only by reproducing and borrow-
ing intercultural understandings that do not belong to them, but also
by engaging in dialogic imagination (Quist 2013) and by inhabiting and
embodying the Other. In such a view, language learners become not only
performers and ‘actors’ of languaculture scripts, but they infuse it with
new meanings and new voices (Kramsch 2009), and so they become
‘interpreters’ and ‘authors’.
By placing the subject at the centre of language learning, I also mean
to look at language learning as a way of questioning our position in the
world, our personal assumptions, values and group belongings. Indeed,
in order to understand language learners’ multilingual worlds, we should
do justice to the complex processes that the individual goes through by
living in a new culture, and how such an experience affects his/her life
trajectory. We should look beyond the learning and acquisition of lan-
guage to fathom more fine-grained ways of scrutinising the additional lan-
guage learner experience that is constructed out of these new linguistic
and cultural worlds. The real challenge, then, lies in how to interpret the
data thrown up by the new lenses applied to language learning, from the
focus on the acquisition of language as an isolated abstract ‘object’ (with
its formal, positivist and abstract nature) independent from the subject,
to language as the locus of an array of intersecting experiences brought
together by the language learner, a complex network of intersecting inten-
tions, reflections, perceptions and figurations.
The difference from previous approaches to the subject in language
learning is not one of degree (i.e., how we position the subject in a scale
of language proficiency) but one of direction and scope. We could ask
ourselves whether language learning results in better self-knowledge; does
it change our life trajectories, for example? Or can it change the way we
live our lives? The re-purposing of language learning that I am articulating
here is an effort to open up new questions about the impact of the self on
language learning and the impact of language learning on the self. And,
ultimately, how this may result in the development of the self through
language learning.
A New Paradigm for Language Learning

In this book I do not engage in theory building in order to provide a
linguistic framework to analyse language learning data, which has already
been done very well through narrative, interactional and socio-linguistic
approaches to language learning memoirs, but to legitimise new types of
discourses and data from language learners, such as their thoughts, tribu-
lations, enactments and reflections. I intend to provide a new theoretical
paradigm to view language learners and their relationship to the linguistic
and intercultural encounter that focuses on what happens to the self when
it engages in language acts: the experiences, the sensations, the emotions,
the silences and the memories that inform the personal worlds of the lan-
guage learner.
The edifice of this new conceptual paradigm for language learning is
one that views languages not as universals, as isolated units that are eas-
ily translated into different languages, nor one that concentrates on the
sociolinguistic and sociocultural complexity on the ground divorced from
language learners’ feelings and memories, but one that explores the links
and connections between the body and the mind, the mental and the
social, and the spaces and the movement between the desires and emo-
tions of the multilingual self and how these are felt by others. In such a
view, our ‘being in the world’ in another language, our inhabiting of the
Other, results in a deep engagement of the self in complex networks of
meanings that are created not in our brains, but at the boundaries of the
language learner body in empathy with others and the target culture. This
is an approach that questions the taken for granted (and a priori) under-
standings of language learners’ identities and motivations in an attempt
to see the language learner as a continuous, multiple and fractured self.
This multiplicity and fluidity of the language learner, however, will not
be seen as a negative, but rather as a positive and creative force that gives
the learner the possibility of being in ‘movement’, in a constant process of
becoming and transformation.
Whereas such epistemologies of the language learning process have
been largely neglected in mainstream SLA theory, valuable discussions
on the role of identity and affect in second language learning have been
emerging in the literature. Indeed, the importance of identity and sub-
jectivity for the multilingual self has been a topic of debate over the last
decade (Block 2007a, b, Norton 2000, 2013, Pavlenko 2005; Kramsch
2005, 2006, 2009) and will be discussed in Chap. 5. On the other hand
the key role of affective practices in language learning will be discussed
26 C. ROS I SOLÉ
there in order to prepare the terrain for outlining a view of the subject that
allows for more personal language learners’ worlds. But before I proceed
to discuss these topics, I will briefly sketch an alternative philosophical
paradigm for SLA.
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CHAPTER 3
Lines of Thought
Abstract This chapter discusses the need for Second Language Acquisition
to go beyond the purely linguistic in the communicative experience by
bringing to the light the so far obscured dimensions of the personal and
experiential in language learning. This chapter introduces a new theoreti-
cal kit to address this challenge, by drawing on philosophical thought that
throws light on complex and rich understandings of the subject as a sen-
tient, agentive and creative human being. In such a view, and in contrast
to the linearity of more rationalistic approaches to the subject, language
learning is seen as a way of applying a subversive stance on the self; of
taking risks and multiple non-linear paths of development. Philosophical
schools of thought, Romanticism, Aestheticism, Phenomenology and
Nomadism, will be invoked in order to understand the subject as both a
fractured self and as a subject in progress. It will be argued that by learn-
ing a new language, language learners do not only satisfy themselves by
looking at the linguistic, but they also engage in heightened perception,
myth-making and the challenging of their habitual intellectual surround-
ings and usual conventions.
Keywords Subject • Creativity • Romanticism • Aestheticism

• Phenomenology • Nomadism • Subject in progress • Second Language
Acquisition (SLA) • Additional language

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-52853-7_3
30 C. ROS I SOLÉ
Language learning goes beyond the purely linguistic in the communica-

tive experience. With its focus on language, Second Language Acquisition
(SLA) has become blind to the thoughts, sensations, practices and lived
experiences that language learners engage in. This chapter will draw on
philosophical thought to illuminate these silenced aspects of the language
learning experience. In such a view, living, as opposed to ‘acquiring’,
‘learning’ or ‘using’ languages, is seen as a detour from conventional and
pre-determined life trajectories, and an opportunity for self-development.
I will be looking at how learners develop the self through Bildung (the
‘cultivation of the self’), as nineteenth-century linguist, philosopher and
educational reformer Wilhelm von Humboldt articulated. He believed
‘character’ at the centre of the educational experience. But if Bildung was
an affirmation of the self, the Romantic movement also had a subversive
and creative approach to the subject. Romantics went beyond the immedi-
ate and observable reality to look into themselves and access unconscious
forces, giving free rein to their expressive powers and imaginations.
This subject-centred approach to language, however, does not mean
the pursuit of individual specific goals. Rather, it encourages the leisurely
appreciation of learners’ surroundings. We may learn languages with no
specific purpose or reward in mind; language learning could appear to us
as ‘art for art’s sake’. An aesthetic approach to language learning throws
new light on the personal worlds of the language learner by privileging
the sensations, the impressions and the epiphanies one can experience in
another language. So, paying attention to the aesthetic in language learn-
ing can be seen as a frame of mind, a disposition that turns the inter-
cultural and linguistic encounter into a perceptual, sensual and affective
experience, one that attunes the senses to the new language.
If self-reflection and a heightened awareness of subjectivity is key in
humanised language learning, nomadic philosophy helps us recast lan-
guage learners’ identities as multiple and fractured figurations of the sub-
ject, that are made up of our imaginations and myth-making. Being a
nomad is subverting a set of conventions that will define the nomadic
state, not the literal act of travelling. By learning a new language, lan-
guage learners engage in conjuring up new worlds, and in subverting their
habitual intellectual surroundings and usual conventions
LINES OF THOUGHT 31
Finally, I will draw in phenomenological philosophy and its theory

of perception. Like Nomadism, the phenomenological approach to lan-
guage negates the independence of mental life and the importance of
highlighting the experiential aspects of language by bringing in the body
and its primary experience at the forefront of how we understand lan-
guage. But phenomenological thought (Merleau-Ponty 1945, 2012) goes
further in implicating the senses and how we perceive reality.
In order to illustrate the potential of language learning for multiple
philosophical insights and interpretations, let’s look at an example of such
a reflective and transformative account through a snapshot of a language
learning experience that appears in Kramsch’s book The multilingual sub-
ject (2009) which I will discuss here in a new light.
One of the most famous literary chronicles of twentieth-century
Europe, the first volume of the celebrated memoirs of Elias Canetti, The
tongue set free, gives a fascinating account of a personal language learn-
ing journey that testifies to the power of new languages to destabilise the
illusion of a coherent identity and to challenge, fragment and change the
course of our lives and our characters in unexpected ways.
In his memoir, Canetti, a Jewish-Ladino writer of Bulgarian origin
shows how his high sensibility to language was nurtured through his early
experiences of language learning. Language learning did not only consist
of learning a new skill, but rather it enabled him to construct and define
his future personal world, one where German, his new language, would
feature prominently and would forge his special relationship to language.
In a very short time, she forced me to achieve something beyond the

strength of any child, and the fact that she succeeded determined the deeper
nature of my German; it was a belated mother tongue, implanted in true
pain […]. The pain was not all, it was promptly followed by a period of hap-
piness, and that tied me indissolubly to that language. It must have fed my
propensity for writing at an early moment
(Canetti 1977/9:70 in Kramsch 2009: 79)
Elias Canetti’s experience of German is a mixture of pain and pleasure;

loss and happiness. Canetti’s motivation for learning German was not
32 C. ROS I SOLÉ
the result of obeying an educational curriculum, but it was motivated

by another kind of obedience: a filial one. He wanted to learn German
in order to join his mother in grieving the loss of her husband -Elias’
father. Whilst they learned the language, mother and son used German
to unravel the spells that the words had on their feelings. The act of per-
forming German became part of an intimate process of mourning. But
such a p ainful experience eventually paid off, as the suffering experienced
through the imposition eventually turned into happiness.
If Kramsch sees the ‘Other’ as primarily a mythical and imagined
place ‘on a symbolic plane’ and Elias Canetti strives to join the sym-
bolic Germanness of the love between his two parents (p. 80), we can
also see a process of self-transformation, a metamorphosis of the banal
and the immediate act of language learning into something very intimate.
With the reading of German and the learning of the language with his
mother, Elias lives and dwells in the language through everyday objects
(the table they were sitting at, the grammar book and the sails he could
see in the lake through the window)and the experiencing of his mother's
harsh teaching methods.
Such a personal and intimate journey with the language departs from
previous accounts in the literature where speakers ‘publicly’ invest in
the language in order to gain social and cultural capital. Their effort
seeks outside recognition and subverting relations of power (Norton
2000), rather than the building of a sense of intersubjectivity through
the deep connection and mutual experiencing of intense feelings and
emotions. In Elias’ world, language learning does not take place by
rehearsing new words in a public aseptic environment, or in a vacuum
of feelings and determined by social patterns and behaviours. Rather,
personal intentions and the complexity and intensity of emotions with
a significant other (his mother) shape his contact and affective attach-
ment to the language. Whilst learning the language, Canetti mourns
his father. Language is the means through which he heals his feelings of
loss and shows solidarity and empathy to his mother’s pain. Language
learning becomes a personal matter. Elias’ journey may not have been
a conscious one, but it made a lasting impression on his character. It
became inscribed in his body and became a transformative experience.
Learning a new language helped Elias overcome his feeling of loss and
enter a path of self-transformation.
LINES OF THOUGHT 33
Elias Canetti’s example of learning of German is a powerful reminder

that language learning performs important and necessary emotional work
and identity construction. Feelings of healing are mixed with those of self-
betterment as the narrative memoir progresses through his life trajectory
and he comes to terms with traumatic periods in his personal life and the
society around him.
‘Bildung’ or the Cultivation of the Self

Canetti’s life trajectory is a good example of a life dedicated to Bildung.
Indeed, Elias’ journey of language learning and self-betterment is not far
off Humboldt’s humanist idea of the use of education for self-cultivation
and personal transformation.
As Wilhelm von Humboldt explains, personal development and self-
cultivation refers to:
The changes that the human character undergoes in particular nations and
periods, as well as in general, through the occupations it takes up.
(Humboldt 1793/1794/2000, 57–61)
This is how the nineteenth-century linguist, philosopher and educa-

tional reformer articulated the ‘cultivation of the self ’. He believed
‘character’ at the centre of the educational experience. Humboldt’s
theory of the cultivation of the self (Bildung) introduced the idea of
endowing education with the humanistic goal of personal develop-
ment and has been applied to the field of language education by Byram
(2010) in order to train the faculties of the mind. Such a repurposing
of language education broadens the utilitarian and functional objec-
tives in language education that currently restrict the purpose of lan-
guage learning to that of providing a workforce for an international
market economy.
Phipps and Gonzalez were one of the first to point out the flaws in
such an utilitarian approach and proposed some possible solutions. They
argued that we should go back to the more ‘speculative aims of Bildung,
of ‘knowledge for its own sake’ (2004: 4). Such a move, they explained,
34 C. ROS I SOLÉ
would not be experimenting with a new way of looking at language

learning; rather, it would reconnect with what language learning so far
had meant to a minority of individuals, the completion of one’s education
and the refinement of character.
Until comparatively recently, indeed, probably until the immediate post-war

period, modern languages were seldom learnt as a means to communicate –
to transact business, or to interact with others. Learning languages was
seen instead as an individual pursuit, a mark of refined culture, the ultimate
expression of a disciplined intellect.
(Greenfell 2000: 2 in Phipps and González 2004: 23).
This time round, the challenge of applying this humanist project, the pur-
suit of the development of the individual, would be to apply it to a wider
public through a democratisation and a repurposing of language learning.
In this way, language learning would not be a ‘note of distinction’ for the
privileged few, a ‘figured world of privilege’ as Coffey (2010) has argued,
but a way of developing the individual in a variety of social groups, politi-
cal environments and stages in life. In this way, the developing of the self
and the affective aspects of language learning would not be a prerogative
of the aristocracy, the elites and the socially mobile, but any young learner
taking languages at school, professionals embarking on language learning,
and migrant workers and asylum seekers for whom language learning may
be a human rights and a life or death issue (Piller and Takahashi 2013).
Romanticism
If Humboldt was not a typical Romantic, he enshrined some of the
Romantic cultural precepts, that is, the reaction against the formality and
containment of Enlightenment rationalism. Humboldt’s emphasis on the
development of the self was taken even further by the Romantic idea of
the power of human creativity. In this section, I will argue the value of
reclaiming the ‘Romantic movement’ of the nineteenth century, not in
an effort to present a uniform and idealised view of national cultures, but
rather in order to make the relationship between language and culture
more flexible, dynamic and multiple. In this view of Romanticism, I will
emphasise the creativity and potential of self-expression of the individual.
Romantics went beyond the immediate and observable reality to look
into themselves and access unconscious forces, giving free rein to their
LINES OF THOUGHT 35
expressive powers and imaginations. The Romantic movement gave

expression to the way the individual pursues unassailable and intensive
experience, heightened emotion and a way of life that breaks with conven-
tion and breathes life into the world of the imagination. It also moved away
from the over-rationalised and atomised accounts of traditional accounts
in SLA to more personalised aspects in language learning that highlight
the power of subjectivity and creativity in the construction of cultural and
linguistic worlds. An illuminating metaphor for explaining this is that of
the ‘mirror and the lamp’ (Ros i Solé and Fenoulhet 2013). This image,
created by the Romantic critic Hazlitt (Abrams 1953), was intended to
give expression to the combined effect of perception and affect in poetry.
It builds an analogy of how the mind perceives its surroundings within a
creative and subjective prism: whilst the mirror reflects nature, the light
of the lamp infuses the reflection with the emotion of the poet. A similar
metaphor can be used to explore how language learners, in their explora-
tions and imaginings of different cultures, also bestow new significance on
their surroundings by reflecting them on the mirror of the self. Language
learners can be seen as people whose moods and states of mind inflect their
representations of the cultures that surround them.
Whilst pragmatic approaches to language learning over the last 30 years
or so have emphasised the instrumental aspects of language (Leung and
Scarino 2016), creativity and the imagination are not alien to language
learning. As several authors have pointed out, there is a similar propensity
to value the mythic and imagined realities in language learning (Dewaele
2004; Dewaele and Pavlenko 2002, Dewaele and Wei 2012; Kramsch
2009, Ros i Solé and Fenoulhet 2011). Instead, by tapping into Romantic
understandings of the world, the affective and symbolic aspects of lan-
guage learning are highlighted and language learning is no longer only
situated in observable reality, but can also be connected with the privately
imagined and created worlds of the language learner. This subjective space
inhabited by the language learner has been conceptualised by Kramsch
(2009) as symbolic competence, which she defines as ‘an ability that is both
theoretical and practical, and that emerges from the need to find appropri-
ate subject positions within and across the languages at hand’ (p. 200). So
this symbolic competence gives the language learner the agency to choose
a vantage point from which to look at cultures. In the following definition
of symbolic competence, however, Kramsch (2009) also sets an agenda for
the type of abilities that are necessary for language learners to create and
mould their own version of the languages and language worlds:
36 C. ROS I SOLÉ
• An ability to understand the symbolic value of symbolic forms and

the different cultural memories evoked by different symbolic systems.
• An ability to draw on the semiotic diversity afforded by multiple
languages to reframe ways of seeing familiar events, create alternative
realities, and find an appropriate subject position ‘between lan-
guages’, so to speak.
• An ability to look both at and through language and to understand
the challenges to the autonomy and integrity of the subject that
come from unitary ideologies and a totalizing networked culture.
(Kramsch 2009: 201)
Whilst the language learner appears as an individual whose freedom is

always compromised by the cultural and linguistic choices he/she has
made and the affiliations and belongings he/she has forged, Kramsch
points out the power of the language learner to make a pact with the
liberatory power of the imagination. ‘For teachers, learners and language
users of all kinds, a multilingual imagination is the capacity to envision
alternative ways of remembering an event, of telling a story, of participat-
ing in a discussion, of empathizing with others […]’ (p. 201).
The language learners’ experiences discussed in this book testify to the
force of the imagination in shaping language learners’ alternative worlds.
This will not be exclusively located in day-to-day language practices but
will also connect with the abstract and fantastic worlds where learners
project their innermost desires. Language learners’ zest for the expres-
sion of emotion and individual introspection whilst living and embodying
another language may uncover an ideal life, a utopia and also a Romantic
orientation towards the intercultural encounter that creates imagined
and fantastic worlds, but above all a deeply personal and intersubjective
experience.
Language learning ceases to be a faithful representation of a
homogenised reality and standardised linguistic code; instead, it becomes
a platform for creating new fantasies and a way to elevate oneself from the
‘catastrophes of everyday life’ (Kinginger 2004a, b), a way of escaping
from the mundane domesticity of one’s own culture and day-to-day sur-
roundings and their tedium.
One way of looking at how language learners apply new prisms to the
perception of new cultural realities is by applying a ‘reflective distance’.
There is a need to look at language learning from a different perspective,
one that does not only involve carrying out specific tasks, but is also a
LINES OF THOUGHT 37
frame of mind and a disposition. Such a disposition can be understood

through the literary movement of Aestheticism.
Aestheticism
[Aestheticism] is commonly held to be a style of perception concerned nei-
ther with the factual information to be gained from the things perceived,
nor with their practical uses, but rather with the immediate qualities of the
contemplative experience itself.
(Bullock and Trombley 2000: 12)
The purpose of taking an aesthetic approach to language learning is to

view language learning as ‘art for art’s sake’. Such an approach would be
the antithesis of the instrumental approach of Communicative Language
Teaching referred to earlier (see Chap. 2). An aesthetic approach to lan-
guage learning can throw new light on the private worlds of the language
learner by privileging the sensations, the impressions and the epiphanies
one can experience in another language. So, paying attention to the aes-
thetic in language learning can be seen as a frame of mind, a disposition
that turns the intercultural and linguistic encounter into a perceptual,
sensual and affective experience, one that attunes the senses to the new
language. As Leung and Scarino (2016: 89) point out in relation to the
repurposing of language learning for aesthetic purposes:
The aesthetic is concerned with the nature of experience as apprehended

through perceptions, senses, and emotions. It highlights the expressive and
imaginative potential in the self and the primacy of the individual’s ascrip-
tion of meaning to experience.
A concern for a sensibility for the lived experience and an atmosphere

infused frame of mind is encapsulated by the ‘decadent’ figure of the flâ-
neur. This character was introduced at the turn of the nineteenth century
by Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin (1983) and it refers to a wandering
figure who engages in a leisurely consumption of the urban surround-
ings. By imagining language learners as twenty-first-century flâneurs, the
language learner acquires a new perspective and lens on the world that
frees him/her from the restrictions of generic appreciations of cultures;
from the straitjacket of the communicative language learner contained in
the four walls of the language classroom and ‘pre-packaged’ versions of
38 C. ROS I SOLÉ
the culture to the more flexible space that includes the urban landscape
and its sensual offerings. The purposelessness and reflective nature of the
flâneur is the antithesis of the action-packed traditional language learner.
This silent, dreamy figure shows a different way of conceptualising the
language learner, someone who does not rush into action but steps back
and becomes a harmless voyeur, a ‘ghost-like’ persona with the gift of
invisibility. The flâneur lifestyle offers the language learner a new stance, a
reflective disposition and a ‘distant gaze’.
Flâneurs are detached from society. They stay on the periphery and,
like a voyeur, they adopt the gaze of the spectator and observer who stud-
ies the world around him like an amateur detective. The flâneur is happy
to be silent, to read and appreciate the culture aesthetically, to browse
scrupulously.
Flânerie is a kind of reading of the street, in which faces, shop fronts, shop
windows, café terraces, street cars, automobiles and trees, become a wealth
of equally valid letters of the alphabet that together result in words, sen-
tences and pages of an ever-new book. In order to engage in Flânerie, one
must not have anything too definite in mind.
(Franz Hessel, Spazieren in Berlin in Frisby 1994: 81)
The language learner can also live language like a flâneur. We can see an
example of this flâneuse disposition in Olga, a student of Croatian who is
studying the language as part of her MA on the Balkans. She is interested
in post-Soviet countries and she decided to learn Serbo-Croat rather than
one of the main languages of the Soviet bloc. Her interest in the former
Yugoslavia was also triggered when her mother recommended a book that
documents a trip to the Dalmatian coast by a woman who has a romantic
affair and gets lost in her adventure.
It actually started when my mum gave me a book that was written in the
1930s/40s about this woman travelling through … It’s called Illyrian
Spring, sort of along the coastline. So I had this kind of romantic notion.
And then also Yugoslavia, this socialist history […] It’s this woman, it’s fic-
tion. I think it was written in the 30s or 40s. […] She is kind of this upper
class woman who gets really fed up with her husband so she just walks out
of her family and she is going to Greece and she sets off by train and she
travels all the way through but she gets to Illyria and Dalmatia. And she
never gets any further. And she meets with these amazing characters. She
has this fantastic love affair and all this sort of stuff. So I just had this incred-
ible romantic view […]
LINES OF THOUGHT 39
Like the typical flâneur at the turn of the twentieth century, reflected in
Walter Benjamin’s writings (1983), Olga experiences her surroundings
primarily as an aesthetic phenomenon. She does that by taking an imagi-
nary and leisurely stroll through the sights of post-Yugoslavian Belgrade.
Olga’s main interest in Serbia is in the city of Belgrade and its social-
ist architecture. As a trained anthropologist, she is ‘hanging around’ and
observing the ordinary life in this culture. Her interest in learning the
language lies on using it to having access to the culture and putting her-
self on a second plane. Olga is interested in observing and becoming a
detective who explores the way of life of another culture by analysing the
old communist council housing in Serbia, and its challenges in a different
political system.
Olga would like to go and live in a post-Soviet country and study the
language. Having the possibility to spend some time there doing field-
work presents itself as a great opportunity to carry out her dream. Whilst
she is preparing herself for this adventure, her approach to language learn-
ing is one which is cautious, solitary and exploratory. She does not culti-
vate any connections with speakers of the language and even in class she
shows a reserved character.
Her understanding of Serbian culture and her lifeworld is built inter-
subjectively through making deep connections and empathising with her
family and her ability to apprehend those aspects of the culture. Her fam-
ily have some links with Serbia in the form of her brother-in-law who
originates from Serbia, even though, she points out her marginality to the
culture as he comes from a Jewish family, therefore not representing the
majority cultures in Serbia.
But Olga’s window onto Serbian culture is not so much about main-
taining contact with people but reading about it in fiction and essays.
Despite having mastered another language as a child (French), she feels
uncomfortable speaking Serbian and feels much more comfortable delv-
ing into the culture through books and images of its architecture and the
sights of the city. As Cronin (2000) would say, Olga practises a language
learning very different from the practically and communicative-oriented
school of ‘book a hotel and get a ticket’ approach. Instead, she prefers an
approach that has the sounds switched off and, like a flâneuse, dreamily
wanders and ‘botanises the asphalt’ of the city in a world of her own.
In the same way, noticing the way things are said and expressed in
a particular culture, not only through words but aesthetically, through
artistic expression (e.g., architecture, music, painting), language learners
40 C. ROS I SOLÉ
are not constantly expected to take action: to speak, to engage in tasks.

Instead, they can be silent, reflective and leisurely observe and scrutinise
their environments, being struck by new meanings and reinterpreting old
ones (Ros i Solé 2013).
Nomadism
If Romanticism and the Aestheticism of the flâneur already point out the
different subjective and affective angles the observer of culture can take,
further incursions into philosophy will give us further understandings of
how nomadism, and affect within it, can play out in language learning.
Studying and entering a new languaculture can also be a way of living
more intensively.
The theorising by Benesch (2012), a critical language educator, marks a
shift of focus in language learning pedagogy by turning to the philosophy
of Spinoza and Gilles Deleuze as a way of challenging the dualism and
separation of mind and body expressed in the rationalist approaches to
second language learning and SLA. Following Deleuze, Benesch invokes
the use of affect to give an alternative view of mind and body that bridges
the rational mind and the feeling body (Benesch 2012). Language learn-
ing then can act as an affective force that mediates between reason and
passion.
Central to nomadic philosophy of the affective embodied self is the
belief that bodies should not be seen as atomised, with separate organs that
form a whole body. Rather, such a philosophy sees the body as ‘unjudged’
and undetermined by objective reason. Instead, nomadic philosophy sees
the body as the locus where affect is experienced as intensities that flow
and are produced in different gradients in the body. If bodies are not to
behave in pre-determined ways, humans have the potential to be affected
in unpredictable ways, thereby challenging a deterministic and constrain-
ing view of society (Benesch 2012).
Movement (of the body and affect flowing through it) is not primarily
anchored in the past, but it is firmly rooted in the present. We are not only
affected by linguistic and cultural experiences we have lived. Our cultural
and linguistic dispositions are not only sediments of the past, but they are
primarily inflected and engendered by the present. The focus is on how
we engage with the present, in the process of becoming and our affirma-
tion of difference. Language learners therefore do not only live off their
past memories in the target culture, but they engage with difference and
LINES OF THOUGHT 41
work out new meanings in the here and now. They ‘dwell’ in language
learning. As Phipps (2007) reflects on her tourist experience of learning
Portuguese:
one cannot dwell – one can only build – in Portugal, as a tourist, if one does
not work at the textures of being with a different language, with Portuguese.
Only through the action of languaging, from language learning as a way of
preparing to dwell in other places, can the sense of dwelling as ‘remain-
ing at peace and preserving of the integrity of being’ be accomplished and
respected
(Phipps 2007: 21)
Dwelling means not just transforming the world but transforming with
the world. Language learners can embark on ‘lines of flight’, of transfor-
mation and becoming, and commune with new ways of being and dwell-
ing in the world (Phipps 2007).
Thinking, and indeed thinking in another language, does not have to
be an internal process, or a transcendental effort to put oneself ‘in another
person’s shoes’ (Byram 1997), or even to join a symbolic and mythic plane
(Kramsch 2009). Rather it can involve a concrete, material and semiotic
connection with the present. Thinking in another language can be seen as
a concrete process outside the body that belies a dynamic and transforma-
tive nature. Such a view resonates with contemporary ideas that language
is not lodged in the mind but is performed and lived in the practices of
everyday life (Phipps 2007; Coffey 2008; Kramsch 2009). We could say
that the reflective and nomadic language learner claims a new kind of per-
formativity for him/herself; one that is not goal-oriented, but is constantly
being created in everyday life through language actions. Reality is created
by enacting it in our own bodies, by performing it in the here and now. As
Butler (1990) posited in her feminist landmark book Gender Trouble, the
enactment of the conventions of reality and language has the serious con-
sequence of creating a specific reality. The enactment of different cultural
conventions through language has the power of creating cultural realities.
Thus the language learner is able to perform language in particular ways
and bring about change. This stands in contrast to a reified view of lan-
guage, a single interpretation of a language as an ideal, an impersonation
that no one actually inhabits. It is only through inhabiting and performing
language that it becomes real and subversive (Butler 1990).
42 C. ROS I SOLÉ
The idea of language as performance is taken up by Braidotti’s notion

of the nomadic subject (1994). Also anchored in performativity and the
embodiment of language, it emphasises the affirmative power of the affec-
tive imagination to liberate the subject from the determinisms of social
life. This vision of thought also offers great potential for an autonomous
view of the subject and subjectivity, one that is rooted in affectivity and
the body. Again, the body is not understood as a product of biology, but
rather a ‘complex interplay of highly constructed social and symbolic
forces […] a surface of intensities’ (Braidotti 1994: 112).
The embodied subject is made up of intersecting forces and spatio-
temporal variables that are in constant transition, ready to change. The
embodied subject is always in a line of becoming. The individual and the
subject is in a flux of successive becomings. Braidotti (ibid.) advocates for
an active state of being which translates into an assertive style of thought.
Nomadism resonates with language learners’ quest for renewal and
transformation. Rather than just learning the abstract rules of language
and using these rules in appropriate contexts, language learners may
approach language learning as living life anew. And they may live it so
intensively that the active states of ‘languaging’ open up unsuspected pos-
sibilities of life: escapism, catharsis or transformation.
A nomad language learner is a figuration of the subject, one that is
about myth-making and about engaging affectively with the present but
one which provides a powerful way to step out of the instrumental and
objective constraints of language learners as subjects anchored in the past
or in the future, in both cases determined by some objective and pre-
determined reality. For a ‘nomadic’, language learning allows us to create
new political and intellectual surroundings that we make out of our own
assemblages of experiences in another language, free from political and
time constraints. Being a nomad is subverting a set of conventions that
will define the nomadic state, not the literal act of travelling. By learning
a new language, we subvert our habitual intellectual surroundings and
we subvert the usual conventions. We inhabit a nomadic state, where we
continue to exist in constant renewal and an active state of being in intri-
cate and intense ramifications and networks. The subject, the language
learner, is not tied to his/her past identities for definition (old passport
credentials, historicities and sediments of the past) and does not look to
the future for an ideal to aspire to (that is unhinged from the present);
rather, he/she has the possibility to firmly live in the present in a flux of
successive becomings, constructing new networks, new assemblages and
new maps of the self.
LINES OF THOUGHT 43
Phenomenology
Like Nomadism, the phenomenological approach to language negates the
independence of mental life and the importance of highlighting the expe-
riential aspects of language by bringing the body and its primary experi-
ence to the forefront of how we understand language.
But phenomenological thought (Merleau-Ponty 1945, 2012) goes fur-
ther in implicating the senses and how we perceive reality. Language is
perception; words do not exist without perception. In fact, it is not until
we say the word that the world is disclosed to us. There is no percep-
tion before the word, and no word before perception. By emphasising
how language is contingent on perception, phenomenological approaches
negate the dualism between subject–object (and links the two). Instead, it
seeks to bring affect into the relationship between subject–object by using
it as a glue that binds the two together.
Phenomenological approaches see mind and body as one and the same
thing. As Benesch posits, ‘The relationship, as Spinoza saw it, was that
mind and body are composed of the same substance’ (Benesch 2012: 39).
But how do we bring the affect back into the relationship between
mind and body? Linguists (Busch 2014; Phipps 2007) have used the phi-
losophy of Merleau-Ponty to explain how the body acts as the bridge
between thought and objects. They point out how Merleau-Ponty empha-
sises the centrality of the body in the production of language and how we
perceive language through it. It then becomes paramount to pay attention
to the perceptual aspects of language.
Merleau-Ponty (1945, 2012) proposed a philosophy of language that
brought the language and body close together: Language is primarily seen as
a bodily phenomenon, and language experiences inscribe themselves in the
body (e.g., language becomes body memory). Merleau-Ponty (ibid.), says
that language is not representative of thought but thought itself. By doing
this, he challenges the relationship between thought and language that we
were accustomed to in more rationalist approaches to language learning. In
this alternative view, language acquires a more central role. A similar thing
occurs with the relationship between the subject and language. Again, here,
the two are not seen as separate but one and the same thing.
So language learners are not seen as subjects that ‘adopt’ a new
language, but they are new speaking subjects in their own right, each lan-
guage providing a new identity; so that when we speak we always put
the subject in a certain position. It is a projection from an ‘I’ to a ‘You’.
44 C. ROS I SOLÉ
We position ourselves in the world and we project ourselves towards the

other (Merleau-Ponty 1945, 2012). Although Norton (2000) concep-
tualisation of subjectivity and Kramsch’s (2009) concept of symbolic
competence did not mention Phenomenology, we can see some common
underlying concepts, such as the view that the subject positions him/her-
self in the world (Norton 2000) and projects him/herself onto others
(Kramsch 2009).
By seeing language learning as liminal and secret, made up of the textures
we experience and the language-homes we dwell on, we conceive another
way of looking at languages that go beyond seeing language as a detachable
and transferable skill that will take us to some promised land. Language is
no longer seen as a transparent, invisible tool either. Rather it is concrete,
it is lived and experienced. Words are played with and felt first and then
reflected upon. Language learners do not need to wait to acquire the com-
plete set of an additional language system and language skills in order to
construct their temporary language-homes. Language learners take part in
the world and the home of the additional language, and dwell in it.
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257–265.
CHAPTER 4
Identity Reimagined
Abstract This chapter discusses the importance of looking at the subject

as a temporary ‘figuration’ and the different kinds of ‘me’ that learning
new languages allows us to be. In order to do this, it reviews recent iden-
tity approaches in Second Language Acquisition that see the identity of
the language learner either as a place of struggle (Norton, B. (2000).
Identity in Language Learning: Gender, Ethnicity and Educational Change.
London: Longman), as a reflection for the self (Pavlenko, A. (2001). "In
the World of the Tradition I Was Unimagined": Negotiation of Identities
in Cross-Cultural Autobiographies. International Journal of Bilingualism,
5(3), 317–344, Pavlenko, A. (2002). Poststructuralist Approaches to the
Study of Social Factors in Second Language Learning and Use. In V. Cook
(Ed.), Portraits of the L2 User(pp. 277–302). Clevedon, UK: Multilingual
Matters) and as a product of the imagination and symbolic thought
(Kramsch, C. (2009). The multilingual subject. Oxford: Oxford University
Press). The conceptualisation of identity as a ‘figuration’ aims at highlight-
ing the intersubjectivity and fleetingness of the language learning experi-
ence by drawing on nomadic philosophy and anthropological approaches
to the subject (Braidotti, R. (1994). Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and
Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. New York: Columbia
University Press; Holland, D.; Skinner, D.; Lachicotte, J.R., & Cain,
C. (2001). Identity and Agency in Cultural Worlds. London: Harvard
University Press). Unlike the poststructuralist approach to ‘identity’ that
saw it as a deteriorated state, a state of d
iscomfort and ambivalence, the

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-52853-7_4
48 C. ROS I SOLÉ
nomadic idea of ‘figurations’ introduces a more positive vision, one where

the learner is allowed to take non-linear paths that are contingent and
respond to the particular situation. Viewing the self as fractured does not
herald a demise of the agency of the self, but rather opens up the possibility
for the learner to take a new lease of life, to feel liberated and empowered.
Keywords Identity • Subjectivity • Figurations • Intersubjectivity •

Nomadism • Second Language Acquisition (SLA) • Additional language
Eva, Mai, Katarina, Martina and Felicia1; Theresa, Carol, Sally and
Elisabeth2; Daphne, Ilaria and Lucy3; Sue and Paul.4 These are identi-
ties given to real language learners in the research literature on identity
in Second Language Acquisition (SLA), and to some they will already
evoke the stories of particular language learners narrated in SLA studies.
They are ‘flesh-and-blood individuals’ (Kramsch 2009) who have given
their heartfelt and detailed accounts of what it is like to inhabit another
language, enduring or enjoying the experience of learning, as the case may
be.
Using first names to refer to specific language learners is a symbolic
gesture, but one that indicates a radical turn in language learning research.
Such a turn has not only shifted the emphasis from the native speaker
ideal to the language learner, but has emphasised the uniqueness of the
language learner experience. In these accounts, learners are presented as
having their own idiosyncratic identities, full of intentionality, purpose
and hope; they are not only learners trying to emulate an ideal public
and generic persona or concept of competence presented to them by reli-
able grammars and dictionaries, teachers or institutions. These language
learner names and the accounts behind them present them as people with
their strengths and foibles, and as multilingual human beings, with their
own language learning itineraries.
Whether their voices are heard in anecdotes, critical incidents, life nar-
ratives or reflections on their language experiences, their memorable and
poignant stories are more real and personal than the made-up scenarios
and idealised models presented in generic cognitive accounts of second
language learning. These are accounts of the daily struggles, the little bat-
tles, the imaginary worlds and the perceptions of the mundane activities
that people enter into when learning a new language. The new language
provides a mirror which helps learners reflect on their subjectivity.
IDENTITY REIMAGINED 49
This approach to the additional language learner indicates a shift in the

representations of language learners in the research literature. As I have
argued in previous chapters, there is a methodological shift from the fac-
tual to the personal. And in this chapter I will argue that we also need a
new shift of focus from the rational to the affective. This will highlight the
fact that language learning cannot only be explained with the narratives
of socialisation processes into the additional language but that it needs to
account for the affective and the creative that takes the language learner
into unexpected and multiple directions and new realities.
Romantic Dispositions: Creativity and Imagination

The language learning encounter can be interpreted as a Romantic adven-
ture. By learning a new language, the learner can read the world anew
through a new subjective prism. Language learners, whilst perceiving their
surroundings within a creative and affective lens, bestow new significance
on their social circumstances and meanings by reflecting them on the mir-
ror of the self and revising their subjectivities (Kramsch and Von Hoene
2001; Ros i Solé and Fenoulhet 2013). Language learners can be seen as
people whose moods and states of mind shape the representations of the
cultures that surround them.
Like a nomad, the language learner puts to one side his/her old lan-
guage conventions and, unburdened by old meanings, embarks on a per-
sonal journey. Whilst using a new language, the language learner can be
likened to the writer of fiction that Bakhtin (1981) presents, free of social
conventions and determinisms, and the traces that words carry of other
people or other conversations. Language learners may not be tied to par-
ticular word arrangements; they experiment with the multiple meanings
and possibilities of language.
the prose writer confronts a multiplicity of routes, roads and paths, that have
been laid down in the object by social consciousness.
(Bakhtin 1981: 278)
Similarly, language learners can claim a new freedom and independence

from the constraints of their domesticated life by abandoning old social
expectations and exploring new ways of reading and embodying the
world. Indeed, language learning introduces new opportunities for expe-
riencing language subjectively and allowing for creative constructions
50 C. ROS I SOLÉ
of cultural and linguistic realities. The language learner wonders at the

oddities, the beauty and the bizarre in the meanings of the new language,
while embracing them and being creative with their interpretations. In
the extract below, Leo Africanus, the character of Amin Maalouf’s novel
based on a real historical character whose life involved travelling and living
through many countries and languages, wonders at the new name he has
been given in sixteenth-century Rome by the Pope by translating it and
transposing it into different languages: Arabic (his language), Latin and
Italian.
John-Leo! Johannes Leo! Never had anyone in my family been called thus!
Long after the end of the ceremony I was still turning the letters and syl-
lables over and over in my head and on my tongue, now in Latin, now in
Italian. Leo. Leone. It is a curious habit which men have, thus to give them-
selves the names of the wild beasts which terrify them, rarely those of the
animals which are devoted to them. People want to be called wolf, not dog.
(Maalouf 1986: 297).
But creativity does not only work in the here and now in the playfulness
and mystiques of language; it is also projected in some imaginary world.
As Takahashi (2013) has argued in her study of language learners in Japan,
female learners of English in Japan fantasise about other cultures by imag-
ining Western men to be the perfect lovers.
Miri believes that women of her generation (born in the 1960 or 1970s)
have a soft spot for a man like Tom Cruise and she still believes that he is
really ‘hot’ (f15aug02miri) (Piller and Takahashi 2010). Chizuko fell in love
with Christopher Atkins who starred in Blue Lagoon (1980) […] During
the participants’ adolescence, their romantic akogare for Western celebrities
became increasingly conflated with a desire for learning English. (p. 36)
As has been pointed out before (Kanno and Norton 2003; Pavlenko and
Blackedge 2003), language learners are more willing to invest in language
learning if they can project themselves in the future as speakers of the addi-
tional language and can imagine the communities of practice they would
join. Language learning is linked to the images language learners form of
themselves in some distant future, whether real or fictitious, whether as
wives of Western men, adventurous travellers or other fantasies. The learn-
ing of a new language then becomes a powerful means for creating new
roles and positions for the self; new possibilities and choices in the socio-
cultural context of the additional language and the new social groupings
that one encounters.
These imagined parallel worlds are not only achieved by new personas
and new scenarios, but they may also be realised by creating new emotional
stances. Kinginger (2004a) tells us of the comfortable cold distance that
the English language allows French-Canadian novelist Nancy Huston to
function in English. In her language learning memoirs, Huston uses the
English language to elevate herself from the mundane details and ‘catas-
trophes’ of everyday life to create better worlds:
For Huston, echoing Virginia Woolf, language is invested with the possibil-
ity of establishing an ironic distance from the “catastrophes” of everyday
life. A woman who writes these catastrophes is on her way to salvation from
drowning in mundane details.
(Kinginger 2004a: 10)
But as we will see later, having a Romantic disposition and the harnessing
of creativity and the world of the imagination does not fully account for
the force of affectivity in the intercultural imagination. Nomadic theory
(Braidotti 1994), provides a new reading of identity that goes beyond
escapism and playful creativity with language. Nomadic theory sees
identity not as a ‘one-off’ flight of the imagination, but as progressive
‘figurations’ and as constant renewals of the self and multiple paths of self-
transformation. But before I present such a reconstructed understanding
of identity, I will give an overview of identity in SLA and its potential for
pushing the processes of becoming further and subjecting it to a nomadic
reading.
Identity Itineraries in SLA

In the last 20 years or so we have seen a growth of interest in identity, and
in particular of the key role of language in building a sense of identity in
social contexts. The constitutive role of language socialisation processes in
the negotiation of the self in language learning draws from many traditions,
such as first language acquisition, sociolinguistics and cultural studies, but
also from sociology, sociolinguistics, anthropology, literary autobiographi-
cal accounts, cultural studies, and discourse and narrative studies.
And yet, for a long time, the literature on additional language learning
ignored the role the self played in learning a language. The beginnings
52 C. ROS I SOLÉ
of identity in SLA looked at how identity was developed in conditions of

immersion in the target language culture; that is, either in the context of
immigrant language speakers (Norton 2000; Block 2006) or the analysis
of language learner autobiographies (Pavlenko 2001; Kinginger 2004b;
Ros i Solé 2004; Kramsch 2009). Such accounts, however, have rarely
referred to the identity processes that language learners go through in
mainstream educational contexts outside the target culture.
The literature on second language identities has emphasised how lan-
guage learning is experienced in a variety of contexts and locations: bilin-
gual couples at home (Piller 2002), at school or in an ESOL class (Cooke
2015), when joining multilingual communities in our cities (Block 2006)
or as a result of border-crossing and migration to another country (De
Fina 2003). It highlights how language learning goes beyond the learning
of grammar rules, lists of vocabulary and the communicative functions of
the language, and is much more than the ‘acquisition’ of a second lan-
guage. Language learners bring a myriad of personal experiences which
will affect the way language learners not only learn, but ‘live’ languages.
Such an approach emphasises the fact that we can embody languages as
well as learning them. Learning a language not only allows us to acquire
information, to participate in conversations and perceive others, but also
to change the way we perceive ourselves. Recent research into identity in
SLA has studied how learning a language challenges the perception we
have of ourselves and our cultural make-up. This research departs from
instrumentalist and functionalist approaches to language education by
highlighting other aspects of language learning such as social integration
(Norton 2000, 2013), escapism or personal liberation (Kramsch 2009;
Kinginger 2004a, 2008) and language learning as an object of desire
(Takahashi 2013).
But we first need to agree on the terminology to be used for such a
complex subject. One of the difficulties in the study of identity in second
language learning is that of terminology. Indeed, there are many ways to
refer to the concept of who a person is. As Ivanič (1998) has pointed out,
there are a plethora of terms to choose from; for example, ‘self’, ‘per-
son’, ‘role’, ‘ethos’ or ‘persona’. Although a common understanding of
the term ‘identity’ is the feeling we have of sameness and continuity over
time and place (Erikson 1968), recent conceptualisation of identity in the
context of language use agrees that identity is a dynamic and multiple
concept contingent on the different contexts and interlocutors we interact
with (Rampton 1990; Ivanič 1998; Norton 2000; Joseph 2004; Block
2007).
Despite the variety of disciplines that have tackled the issue of identity
in language learning such as sociology, cultural studies, anthropology and
of course linguistics, a growing trend in language learning research locates
the importance of identity building on language learning (e.g., Norton
2000; Block 2007; Coffey and Street 2008; Kramsch 2009) and inter-
cultural communication (e.g., Byram 1997); concepts such as Investment
(Norton 2000), Symbolic Competence (Kramsch 2009), Intercultural
Competence (Byram 1997), the imagined language learner (Kanno and
Norton 2003) and the project of the self (Coffey and Street 2008).
The particular strand of research I will refer to in this book, and which
will inform my understanding of identity, is one that looks at language
learning from a socio-cultural approach and, in particular, addresses the
role of the subject in language learning within a phenomenological and
nomadic approach, drawing on the inter-subjectivity of the learner (as
explained in Chap. 3) and its resulting ‘figurations’. But before I expand
on the concept of ‘figuration’, let us review the socio-cultural approach
within poststructuralist philosophical theory that has informed it.
Socio-Cultural and Poststructuralist Theories

of Identity
Block (2007b) points out how the field of identity in language learning
has mainly been developed within poststructuralist theory. Here identities
are not seen as static, as permanent traits that we inherit when we are born
and we carry throughout our lives. Rather, they are seen as being desta-
bilised and in flux. When aspects of learners’ identities are changed, how-
ever, a new identity does not replace an old one; rather, language learners
build a third space where there is a negotiation of difference in the ‘fis-
sures, the gaps and the contradictions’. In language learning, then, identi-
ties are in a permanent state of ‘ambivalence’: language learners feel both
apart from and part of the ‘new’ culture. For poststructuralists, identities
are subjective and emotional in nature. The following extracts from the
autobiographies of two chicano writers, Ilán Stavans and Gloria Anzaldúa,
are a good example of this feeling of being torn and pulled towards dif-
ferent cultural affiliations and yet being comfortable in such ambivalence.
54 C. ROS I SOLÉ
We Latinos in the United States have chosen to consciously embrace an

ambiguous, labyrinthine identity as a cultural signature […] Resistance to
the English-speaking environment has been replaced by the notions of tran-
screation and transculturation, to exist in constant confusion, to be a hybrid,
in constant change.
(Stavans 2002: 9)
The new mestiza copes by developing tolerance for contradictions, a toler-

ance for ambiguity. She learns to be an Indian in Mexican culture, to be
a Mexican from an anglo point of view. She learns to juggle cultures […]
Not only does she sustain contradictions, she turns the ambivalence into
something else.
(Anzaldúa 1999: 101)
Whilst incursions into poststructuralist thought through literary accounts

provided the springboard for looking at the bilingual and multilingual
experiences of language learners (Pavlenko 2001, 2002; Ros i Solé 2004),
it was Norton’s seminal work on identity in second language learning
(Norton 1995, 2000) that made the poststructuralist approach to second
language learning identity a point of reference and the favoured theo-
retical framework for exploring language learners’ sense of self. Her post-
structuralist approach to real language learners presented a compelling
argument for endowing the language learner with an agency and a ‘voice’.
She explains that when language learners engage in their social environ-
ment, they convert a set of identity traits and labels that they inherit when
they are born (e.g., white, female, Catalan), into fluid and dynamic con-
cepts that challenge the idea that identities remain unchanged throughout
one’s life. Through the subjects she studied, Eva, Mai, Katarina, Martina
and Felicia, she painted a picture of language learning that centred around
the negotiation and reconstruction of these women’s identities.
In doing so, Norton (2000) reconceptualised motivation in identity
terms. She argued that identity, like motivation, is not something static;
rather, learners experience different types of investment throughout their
life (i.e., in different contexts and circumstances). The notion of invest-
ment involves organising and reorganising one’s self-perception in rela-
tion to the social world of the additional language. In other words, by
investing in another language, language learners are not merely learning
some content which is not related to their feelings, rather they deploy
their desires and play them out within a particular historical moment,
context and social milieu. The notion of investment shapes the learners’
language learning practice by enacting it against their own personal values

and projects for the future. As Norton (2000) puts it:
A learner’s motivation to speak is mediated by other investments that may

conflict with the desire to speak – investments that are intimately connected
to the ongoing production of the learners’ identities and their desires for
the future.
(Norton 2000: 120)
In this way, investment in the language is linked to the role it has on the
identity and construction of the self. As Norton (1997) put it:
every time language learners speak, they are not only exchanging informa-
tion with their interlocutors; they are also constantly organizing and reor-
ganizing a sense of who they are and how they relate to the social world.
They are, in other words, engaged in identity construction and negotiation.
(Norton 1997: 410)
In the new understanding of motivation, which Norton has redefined as

‘investment’, learners’ agency is key. Learners are not conceived as dupes
who consume whatever language learner roles are thrown at them, rather
they have the power to act on their identities through socialising in the
language. Learners take centre stage in the language learning experience
and create opportunities for themselves by exercising their agency and
developing relationships with the world; hence the importance of giving
learners the opportunity to deploy their agency in the social practices and
roles they adopt in society. Kramsch (2006) also points out the research
fallacy in SLA of drawing artificial boundaries between the person and the
social practices they engage in:
It [SLA] has separated learners’ minds, bodies, and social behaviours into
separate domains of inquiry and studied how language intersects with each
of them … The cognitive and the social have been seen as distinct entities
themselves separate from language.
(Kramsch 2006: 98–99)
Instead of this arbitrary separation and alienation of body, mind and social
practices, Kramsch (2006) argues that the three elements are brought
together and interact with one another through language. Language
becomes a site of negotiation and a space for constructing the meanings
that will define the self in another language.
56 C. ROS I SOLÉ
Within such a holistic and socially situated and linguistically enacted

view, learners are partly conditioned by the resources and discourses at
their disposal (Ivanič 1998).
Patchwork Identities
If language learners are active people constantly engaged in meaning mak-
ing with the discoursal resources at their disposal, we should make allow-
ances for a more complex, dynamic and multilayered view of the language
learner. Language learners’ identities should not be looked at as the static,
flat, tourist-like personas assumed in many language pedagogy discourses.
A fairer and more accurate representation would be one that presents them
as identity patchworks made up of different versions of the self. In such a
theoretical frame, identity is not only imbued with agency, but it is also
contingent and context-dependent on linguistic, ethnic, social and cultural
factors. Hence, additional language learners’ new socio-cultural identities
do not develop at the expense of their old ones. They co-exist, as individu-
als are not attached to a single, fixed social or cultural identity; rather, they
belong to a multiplicity of communities (The New London Group 1996)
that combine sediments from the past, configurations from the present and
projections for the future. Identities are fragmented and fluid, and respond
to a combination of labels, which are organised and rearranged according
to different life circumstances. The linguistic and cultural identities of lan-
guage learners may not be fixed to a single affiliation, English or Arabic,
Catalan or British, Serbian or Croatian, for example, but rather, we may be
confronted with a complex combination of labels that is reassembled and
repositioned according to the situation and the interlocutors at hand. How
these labels are combined and arranged is a matter of debate.
Whilst we have seen that social power struggles and legitimisation pro-
cesses help the building of second language identities (Norton 2000), the
social is also perceived as a way of linking the societal with the inner world
of the language learner (Kramsch 2006), as I will develop further in the
next section.
Subjectivity
As I explained above, Kramsch’s (2006) conceptualisation of learners’
subjectivities moves its focus from the social to concentrate on the rela-
tionship between the mind, the body and the soul, and how the inner life
of the language learner is projected onto the social plane. The learner is
abstracted from the situation and is seen as the location where the expe-
riencing and the expression of new emotions, and the evoking of past
memories and fantastic worlds takes place. The meanings contained in
particular linguistic resources and social interactions take refuge in the lin-
guistic subjectivity of the language learner, which becomes the intellectual
and emotional plane where identities are reworked; a site in which to play
with new meanings.
Whilst bringing in the contingency of space and sociality in the making
of learners' subjectivities, this approach also uses the time–space factor
as a reflection of learners’ states of mind. It looks at how identity flows
across time by bringing the fluidity of identity across time (the individuals’
biography) and space (the multiple locations where language learning is
enacted). Language learning is interpreted as learners’ perceptions, posi-
tioning and projections of themselves, with their histories, their feelings
and desires, in multiple geographical and cultural spaces. Kramsch (2009)
provides an example from a Vietnamese student of English who talks about
his feelings towards English and makes the distinction between ‘speaking’
and ‘talking’ to indicate the feeling of alienation that English provokes
in him, and how this is related to how differently language flows out of
his mind and body into the different times and spaces in his life. Whereas
when he ‘talks’ in his mother tongue he involves all the senses, when he
‘speaks’ English, he just uses his body as a conduit for his thoughts.
As for English, I do speak the language but I don’t think I will ever talk it.
English is the language that flows from the mind to the tongue and then to
the pages of books. It is like a box of Plato blocks which allows you to make
anything. But a Plato house cannot shelter human lives and a Plato robot
cannot feel! I only talk Vietnamese. I talk it with all my senses. Vietnamese
does not stop my tongue, but it flows with the warm, soothing lotus tea
down my throat like a river, giving life to the landscape in her path. It rises
to my mind along with the vivid images of my grandmother’s house and of
my grandmother. It enters my ears in the poetry of the Tale of Kieu, singing
in the voice of my Northern Vietnamese grandmother. It appears before my
eyes in the faces of my aunt and cousins as they smile with such palpable joy.
And it saturates my every nerve with healing warmth like effect of a piece
of sugared ginger in a cold night. And that is how I only talk Vietnamese.
(Hinton 2001: 243 in Kramsch 2009: 87–88)
58 C. ROS I SOLÉ
But if language identities are so personal, if some languages are more likely
to touch our hearts and our feelings, why is the instrumental approach to
language learning so pervasive and widespread? What kind of language
learning should be envisaged for languages of the ‘heart’? Below is a
language policy that has attempted to embrace such an approach by invok-
ing ‘languages of the heart’ .
Languages of the Heart

The ‘personal adoptive language’ study (Maalouf et al. 2008) put forward
a plan for language education in Europe that acknowledged that some
languages may be closer to our hearts than others. This report called for a
change of direction in language education in which languages are seen not
only in relation to their functional rewards, but for their more symbolic
and personal qualities, where the subjective value of languages for each
person is highlighted.
If we are to reverse this seemingly inexorable trend we have to make a clean

break with the traditional logic behind language learning, by making a clear
distinction between the two choices to be made, one depending on the
international status of a language, and the other, that of the personal adop-
tive language, based on completely different criteria which are very varied
and very subjective.
(Maalouf et al. 2008: 17)
Languages are seen as a means of one’s heritage, identity and moral val-
ues. Maalouf et al.’s (2008) report, however, signals that linguistic and
cultural heritage of Europe should not be a fixed and closed catalogue,
but rather it should be made a dynamic and flexible resource that enables
and encourages European integration. The idea of the ‘personal adoptive
language’ would promote a new motivation for language learning ‘differ-
ent from his or her language of identity, and also different from his or her
language of international communication’ (p. 10). It advocates the learn-
ing of a language at a very high level (like a mother tongue), acquiring a
familiarity with the countries where the language is used, and a knowledge
of the ‘literature, culture, society and history’ (p. 10) of their speakers.
Although I agree with many of the points outlined above, my view differs
in at least two respects:
The personal adoptive languages proposal may be interpreted as clas-

sifying languages into ‘languages of the heart’ and languages for ‘inter-
national communication’, or ‘private’ and ‘public’ languages. But one
cannot make a distinction between different types of motivations for dif-
ferent languages, as often these are inseparable. Instead, I propose to take
a fresh look at the benefit of language learning for not only private and
public purposes, for personal consumption or public functional use, but
combining both, by emphasising a new benefit derived from language
learning, that of self-development, self-cultivation and the development
of a cosmopolitan self.
Moreover, the personal adoptive languages approach assumes that we
have a choice in deciding which languages are ‘languages of the heart’ and
which ones are not, despite the fact that we may learn Arabic or English
out of a desire to develop an ethical stance or because it is necessary in
order to obtain citizenship within a new country. There is also the danger
of stereotyping languages and downgrading them into heritage or ‘com-
munity’ languages, languages that are only worth learning for the more
private domains.
In other words, the language learning subject is seen as welded to a
particular combination of linguistic and cultural identities with particular
hierarchies and functions for his/her languages. Instead, I would like to
argue that the way we use and relate to languages is not fixed. Languages
can be foregrounded or backgrounded according to the experiences lived
by the language learner and life circumstances, so that they cannot be
categorised as ‘instrumental’ (public) or ‘symbolic’ (private) even for
each individual. Instead, a new metaphor that does not divide languages
according to purpose is needed. We need to talk about the subjective in
language learning, the personally valuable and relevant for a particular
individual and her circumstances. People’s shifting motivations, personal
links and boundaries drawn around cultures are in constant flux, and they
make use of both the subjective and the intersubjective aspects of language
learning. But language learning is not about choice either, the choosing of
a particular lifestyle over another one, for example, as if there was no exter-
nal social life that influenced our behaviours. It imagines languages and
cultures as something we can consume, and languages are seen as uncon-
nected to learners’ dynamic personal histories, social networks and cultural
practices. But first, let’s see how a more radical choice-oriented approach
to language identities looks like.
60 C. ROS I SOLÉ
Lifestyles
According to Gray (2012), celebrity culture and lifestyle has infiltrated
the global English Language Teaching (ELT) industry. He argues that
celebrity culture has become commonplace in our society, as explained in
many bestseller books on the subject. The world view underpinning celeb-
rity culture is one that emphasises spectacular personal and professional
achievement and promotes selfishness, representing a single-minded frame
of mind in a culture that values individualism and success. According to
Gray (2012), it started in the 1970s but it became more prominent from
the 1980s onwards.
In fact, if we take a neoliberal and market-driven point of view, the con-
cept of identity is related to that of celebrity. The word lifestyle originated
in marketing, with the creation of a composite version of the social and
individual aspects of identity (Van Leeuwen 2009). However, while life-
styles are always attached to a social group, these are not created following
the traditional criteria, such as those found in questionnaires, where social
identities are linked to stable social positions such as class, gender, age and
occupation. Instead, Van Leeuwen suggests the following definition of
lifestyle is more appropriate to describe today’s modern identities:
a combination of, on the one hand, things which formerly would have been
the province of individuality, such as ‘attitudes’ and ‘personality traits’ and
‘feelings’, and, on the other hand, things that are more in the public domain
such as income, and especially consumer behaviour.
(Van Leeuwen 2009: 214)
The social aspect of identity allows the individual to not only express alli-
ances with certain values and attitudes, but also to be recognised by oth-
ers. In the lifestyle version, however, as opposed to the ascribed traditional
‘identity’, these alliances and attitudes have been created by corporations
and marketing experts, which individuals opt to buy into. In this way, we
are made to believe that lifestyles allow us to introduce more choice into
the way we lead our lives. Individuals are not necessarily tied to behaving
according to their ‘old’ identity markers of age, gender, nationality or
class. 'Instead, individuals can subjectively experience new identities that
are globally available in “off the shelf” models’ (Van Leeuwen 2009: 214).
If we apply this view to language learning, individuals who are born
with an ascribed identity can later in life opt to form alliances and links
with temporary lifestyles that will add to their identities. But, unlike fluid
poststructuralist identities, lifestyles are already pre-packaged identities

and prêt-à-porter models. In this way, language learners are seduced to
believe that they can easily change their lifestyle and upgrade to a bet-
ter model. Language learners are persuaded that they can exercise their
choice by buying into a lifestyle and culture created by some sophisticated
linguistic marketing policy by corporations, institutions, or government
departments, to which they are exposed through the media, the internet
or from travelling to the country. For example, consider the kind of cul-
tures exported by cultural institutes abroad such as the French Institute,
the British Council, the Goethe Institute or the lesser known Catalan
institute, Institut Ramón Llull.
Indeed, the way Catalan language and culture is exported by the Catalan
cultural institute is of relevance here. The Institut Ramón Llull’s focus,
like other cultural institutes, is to be a cultural ambassador for Catalan cul-
ture. It aims at spreading a highly polished cultural brand, to reach those
non-Catalan populations who want to know about Catalonia and to give
them a version of its language and culture that represents a particular view
of society. In this way, the Catalan government is able to place its culture
at a particular socio-educational level, one that is deemed worthy of study
in schools and higher education. This representation and marketing of
Catalan is far removed from the image of a ‘minority language’ or even
‘community language’, which in the UK is coterminous with a marginal
subject, ‘a term in danger of becoming the epitome of low status curricu-
lar subjects’ (Tosi 1987: 43)
Such a packaged version of Catalan language and culture is a far cry
from the way that the linguistic policy department advertises Catalan iden-
tities, and which influences the way Catalan is marketed to immigrants in
Barcelona. Both are highly selected versions of the culture and the lan-
guage and lifestyles ready for the language learner to consume and opt
into, one for the immigrant to Catalonia, another for the ‘international’
elite outside the Catalan territory. We could say that there are two ver-
sions of Catalan, the public and the private, which supports the view that
learners are often presented with marketed versions of languages: i.e. 'lan-
guages of the heart', and 'languages for functional purposes'. Whereas the
cultural institute advertises a Catalan culture to be consumed ‘publicly’,
the other version of Catalan produced at home for migrants is one that is
envisaged to be consumed ‘privately’ in the homes and places of work of
migrant workers, and it is one that focuses on the pragmatic and transac-
tional uses of the language.
62 C. ROS I SOLÉ
But versions and interpretations of cultures do not need to be rooted in

political choices and embedded in particular ideologies. In contrast to this
politicised version of Catalan languaculture, the view of language learning
I have been presenting so far in this book is one that questions the division
between public and private made by institutions and policymakers that
try to direct language learners and their identities in particular directions.
Instead, I propose an emancipatory language learning that rebels from
such controlling ideological straitjackets and allows language learners to
choose their own learning purposes and trajectories, fed primarily by the
power of their agency and imagination. In the next section, I consider
how learners’ identities are rooted in this idea of identity.
Moving Through Languages

The idea that language learners travel through cultures by tracing their
own trajectories, a ‘project of the self’ and a life narrative, has been a recur-
rent theme in the literature on language learning and identity. Pavlenko
(2005) talks about language learners’ construction of their own identity
narrative, echoing Hoffman’s (1989) autobiographical account of a trajec-
tory of the self:
As humans we are constantly organizing and reorganizing our sense of who

we are and how we relate to the social world. As a consequence, our feel-
ings, desires, and emotional investments, including language investments,
are complex, contradictory, and in state of flux.
(Pavlenko 2005: 225)
If we look at the multiplicity of social, physical and imagined contexts that

the learner is embedded in, we will see the potential to develop a sense of
agency in language learning. Holland et al. (2001) define agency as the
behaviour of the person-in-practice, the authoring-self who develops his/
her personhood and subjectivity at the intersection of the historic–social
conditions and the sources of the self. This interface occupies the space
between the past and the present. In such a view, the constant and often
contradictory reworkings of agency of the multilingual and multiple con-
texts of language learners may be at the heart of the composition of their
sense of self.
In this empowered vision of language learners, language learning entails
taking an active part in the socio-cultural ‘practices of the self’. Learners
not only ‘participate in’ social and intellectual situations but they act and
'move' in the day to day of languages and cultures. The agency of the lan-
guage learner puts him/her in a position of power; to become a person-
in-practice rather than just a receiver of knowledge. As Street (1993) has
argued, cultural processes involve competing discourses and social change:
‘[Culture] is an active process of meaning making and contest over defini-
tion, including its own definition’ (p. 25). Within such a fluid, contested
and situated understanding of what language learning means, the learner’s
relationship with it is one which does not take a particular target language
and culture as a ‘given’ but contests and manipulates its meanings. Within
such a view, the learner may be more open to relate to language from a
unique and personal vantage point, where lived in and 'performed' emo-
tional qualities are as important as objectivity and scrutiny.
Within a more subjective approach to language learning (e.g., Norton
2000; Pavlenko 2002 a/b), learners’ engagements with the new culture
do not have to conform to previously packaged versions of what might
motivate them. Instead, they can develop their own unique orientations
and understandings. Their positions are not limited to instrumental goals
or the idealised ‘tourist gaze’. Indeed, learning languages can open new
possibilities for language learners to shape cultural identities to fit their
feelings, their biographies and their imagined futures. Learners can come
in different guises: a Pakistani doctor studying Arabic to read the Koran,
a second generation Serb learning her heritage language, a Greek-Cypriot
student of Turkish or a French language teacher studying Japanese. These
are all examples of learners for whom learning a language may already be
part of their multiple identities.
Moreover, the motivations and agencies that these learners bring with
them may range from the religious or political to the cultural or academic.
With such complex and varied backgrounds and goals, the language
learner is unlikely to fit easily into essentialised versions of the culture and
stereotypes or even, mediating or brokering roles in between cultures.
Instead, the learning of languages could be viewed as a ‘project of the
self’ (Coffey and Street 2008). Such subjectively experienced language
learning could enlarge not only learners’ communicative, but also identity
repertoires, to signal and build on different aspects of the self: who lan-
guage learners want to be and how they want to be perceived by others;
that is, a larger project of the self in which a life itinerary and a project for
self-betterment through education are invoked. In the next section I shall
discuss how language learners’ identities can be viewed with this objective
64 C. ROS I SOLÉ
in mind: that of the cultivation of the self, through self-expression and the
use of the imagination. I will also explain how nomadic thought offers a
useful framework to explore the possibilities that positive and affective
fragmentations of the self can offer to the language learner.
Figuring identity
As we have discussed, language learners’ desire to explore new reali-

ties responds partly to an urge, in individuals more generally, to liberate
themselves from social forces and escape familiar surroundings. Language
learning paradoxically amplifies the familiar in learners’ social and cultural
lives, which is reassessed, weighted and reconstituted into more exciting
forms and realities. Liberating oneself from the determinism of social life
is made possible thanks both to our ability to step out of our realities
and to objectify them; making use of our imaginations and self-directing
ourselves (Holland et al. 2001). The power of imagined worlds and our
agencies is used to overcome the limitation of social determinism. Agency
allows us to create new ways of being within historical, social and psy-
chological constraints, which Holland et al. (2001) call ‘figured worlds’,
and the boundaries of the self are redrawn through the use of imagina-
tive power. If we translate this to the language learner context, language
learners could draw on new linguistic resources to conjure up imagined
worlds inaccessible to others (Kramsch 2006). Such worlds are inhabited
by speech communities they may not yet have met. Kanno and Norton
(2003: 242) point out that they wish to extend the notion of immediately
accessible communities of practice to:
future relationships that exist only in the learners’ imagination as well as

affiliations such as nationhood or even transnational communities that
extend beyond local sets of relationships.
(Kanno and Norton 2003: 242)
Borrowing from the concept of ‘figured worlds’ above, Coffey (2011)

argues that students of Modern Languages in the UK construct their lan-
guage learner lives as ‘figured worlds of privilege’ by storying their lives
as educated liberals or cosmopolitans. In these narratives, individuals con-
struct language learning as cultural capital that allows them greater social
mobility and access to worlds of privilege. Below I reproduce a quote from
Sue, one of the students in Coffey’s corpus.
I think I probably […] started to […] –you know, I was interested in clothes
and looking good and […] all that sort of stuff and, again, that French –
there was something about the style and all those sorts of things that I
started to really get a liking for, I suppose, […] culturally; and [then] as I
grew up and […] into adulthood, the sort of food and way of life and all that
[…], which I didn’t have much of a taste for for a long … or didn’t taste, or
didn’t get much of, for a long time […] So I suppose it was probably quite
later on that that really came into its own.
(Coffey 2011: 65)
For Coffey (2011: 54), figured worlds are social worlds that are repro-
duced by those participating in them as they take on the values and norms
of those worlds and interpret them. The possibility to bring in their agen-
cies allows the learner to develop a sense of their worlds, to work out
an experience of distinctiveness and to enter trajectories and processes of
personal transformation over their lifetimes.
In order to acknowledge learners’ identities, lifestyles and imagined
worlds, language learners need to be studied as complex human beings,
with life stories and trajectories that change across time. Within this view,
language learning reveals itself as a highly personal and unique experience,
in which the learner incorporates into the language learning experience
the socio-cultural baggage he/she comes with, and the reinterpretation of
such lived experiences with new interpretations and within new imagined
communities (Kanno and Norton 2003) and figured worlds (Holland and
Leave 2000). Such an approach tells us more about the diverse personal
and social influences in learners’ motivations and their language learn-
ing ambitions. In the next section I discuss how the concept of ‘figured
worlds’ can be taken further with the notion of rhizomatic figurations.
Rhizomatic Figurations
The concept of ‘figurations’ can be expanded by the metaphor of ‘rhi-
zomatic figurations’ proposed by Braidotti’s nomadic philosophy (1994):
The rhizome is a root that grows underground, sideways; Deleuze plays

it against the linear roots of trees. By extension, it is “as if” the rhyzom-
atic mode expressed a nonphallogocentric way of thinking: secret, lateral,
spreading, as opposed to the visible, vertical ramifications of Western trees
of knowledge.
(Braidotti 1994: 23)
66 C. ROS I SOLÉ
Within this philosophical stance, language learner life is no-longer a linear

path to a second language identity; but rather, non-linear lines of becom-
ing that take new shapes and grow laterally and secretly in unexpected
directions. In this world, it is the language learner and his/her contem-
poraries that will contribute to creating the structures and the networks
by which the life of the language learner will be lived. Such a conceptu-
alisation of a language learner’s lifeworld necessitates a more creative and
socially contingent approach to identity, one that takes into account not
only the linear, vertical and subjective apprehension of the world, but one
that is based on the interconnectedness of individuals, one that works
horizontally and intersubjectively. Such a view connects the learner with
what others think and how they value the world; in other words, it brings
about an empathic view of the world; one that does not push learners to
see ‘difference’ as an obstacle but, whilst recognising difference, uses it as
a positive force (Braidotti 1994).
A view of the learner’s world as a rhizomatic figuration adds to and
departs from previous conceptualisations such as Norton’s (2000) and
Kramsch’s (2009). Norton’s (2000), poststructuralist view of identity
(seen in Chap. 3) is one built on a view of the language learner’s world that
is ‘vertical’ and partly determined by a language learner’s need to prove
and legitimise him/herself in a native speakers’ world, where it assumed
that the learner wants to climb up a power-social ladder. In the vertical
relationship to language learning, language learners invest in fitting into
specific situations and acquiring recognition by others, rather than secretly
and laterally creating their own. The focus is on power relations between
the learner and the native speaker that are in full view, rather than on the
building of an alternative path that creates something new out of their
mundane and ordinary experiences.
On the other hand, the concept of the rhizomatic figurations of the
language learner builds on Kramsch’s (2009) theorisation of identity; it
brings in new elements to the construction of the language learner’s iden-
tity that focus and expand on the concept of intersubjectivity. Although,
as we saw, Kramsch works identity from the subjectivity of the language
learner and from the ‘within’, she also brings an understanding of the con-
cept of intersubjectivity that connects the learner deeply and profoundly
to the discourses of the other. For Kramsch, learners do not only approach
language subjectively, that is, privately, but also intersubjectively, in ‘com-
munion’ with others. There is a relationship built between the subject and
the other through the new language as it bears the traces of the sounds,
the shapes and the meanings of others. Building on Kramsch’s insight

into the intersubjective worlds of the language learner, we can see that
the language learner’s deep understanding of the other involves a sense
of empathy and of putting oneself in someone else’s shoes. But this inter-
subjective ‘reaching out’ goes beyond comparing oneself to the other.
Instead, it creates a synergy and an analogy with the feelings, the judge-
ments and perceptions of the other. However, Kramsch’s understanding of
the perceptions and experiences of the language learner are the product of
the learner’s imagination, they are symbolic understandings of the world
where the connection between the sign and the world has been severed.
Language learners are enamoured with a fantasy version of the foreign lan-
guage and the intersubjectivity achieved in the ‘target culture’, rather than
the reality of language learning and its constant processes of becoming
and transformation in mundane and banal goings on. This book argues
that the personal practices of the language learner are not only located in
a fantastic world, but that there may not be a clear-cut separation between
the real and the imagined, the public and the private realm, or indeed fact
and fiction.
Notes
1. Norton, B. (2000). Identity and Language Learning. Harlow:
Pearson.
2. Ros i Solé, C. (2007). Language Learners’ Sociocultural Positions
in the L2: A Narrative Approach, Language and Intercultural
Communication, 7:3, pp. 203–216.
3. Gallucci, S. (2011). Language learning, identities and emotions
during the year abroad: case studies of British Erasmus students in
Italy. PhD Thesis, University of Birmingham. http://etheses.bham.
ac.uk/1735/1/Gallucci_11_PhD.pdf.
4. Simon Coffey and Brian Street. The Modern Language Journal. Vol.
92, No. 3 (Fall, 2008), pp. 452–464.
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CHAPTER 5
Brave New Lifeworlds
Abstract This chapter argues that language learners cannot only

construct new figured identities for themselves, but that these may be
inscribed in intensely self-manufactured worlds. I describe the sphere the
language learner inhabits through the phenomenological concept of life-
world, which captures the understanding of the language learner’s sense
of self as a conscious and unconscious ownership of a multilingual world.
In such an understanding, language learners’ lived experiences are not
only seen as direct experiences of the world but also as deterritorialised,
autonomous and unpredictable. Linguistic and cultural lives are eman-
cipated from essentialised and idealised notions of cultures and instead
become nomadic and contingent on the locality and the terrains on which
the learner treads. In order to explore how these worlds develop, I draw
on the notion of Spracherleben (the lived experience of language) and its
emphasis on direct sensation and perception. The illustration of lifeworlds
and Spracherleben of learners of Serbian/Croatian, Catalan and Arabic will
provide vivid accounts of the forms these appropriations and interpreta-
tions of cultural experiences take, and the resulting self-assembled cartog-
raphies of the world.
Keywords Lifeworld • Spracherleben • Deterritorialised • Figurations

• Personal worlds • Lived experiences • Perception • Second Language
Acquisition (SLA) • Additional language

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-52853-7_5
72 C. ROS I SOLÉ
Language learners’ life stories have been a prominent feature in Second

Language Acquisition (SLA) literature since the ‘social turn’ and its inter-
est in learners’ identity (Block 2007a, b; Norton 2000; Kramsch 2009;
Pavlenko and Lantolf 2000). Such understandings of the additional
language learner need to be framed within a superdiverse world of cos-
mopolitan visions where the world is largely populated by multilingual
individuals (Delanty 2005, Beck 2006). And yet these multilingual worlds
are not usually depicted in accounts of language learners' lives. Instead,
they are read through native speakers’ eyes and overshadowed by the over-
powering presence of their lives and cultural spaces, a world that language
learners aspire to belong to and struggle to come to terms with. Whilst
previous discussions have argued the need for language learners to claim
legitimacy for a ‘new’ second language identity (Firth and Wagner 2007;
Block 2007a, b), this chapter will reclaim not only new separate identities
and existences for the language learner, but it will also argue that these
do not need to coincide and claim legitimacy in ‘native’ speakers’ worlds.
This chapter will locate the language learner in a new cartography of the
world, one that claims an independent, autonomous and de-territorialised
home for the language learner.
I will argue that the extraordinary worlds of language learners are not
necessarily spatially bound to particular objective and territorialised cul-
tural formations. Rather, they may belong to an altogether different kind
of cultural imaginary, one that is not based on abstract ‘imagined com-
munities’ (Anderson 1991), but rather on the ordinary and the banal
of language practices, the lived experiences and the worlds of possibility
that multilingual subjects create for themselves. If we bother asking, we
will see that language learners have rich and complex stories to tell about
their memories, goings on and unexpected adventures whilst learning an
additional language that so far have not featured prominently in accounts
of SLA research or pedagogical understandings and practices in language
teaching. This chapter will use the personal in language learning to achieve
a greater understanding of the multilingual and de-territorialised worlds
of the language learner.
Despite the wealth of studies in intercultural communication, language
education has traditionally positioned language learners in national ter-
ritories rather than cosmopolitan, transnational realities or multilingual
worlds (Block and Cameron 2002; Kramsch 2009; Coffey 2010; Risager
2007; Ros i Solé 2003). As I have argued elsewhere (Ros i Solé 2013),
what has been foregrounded in studies of intercultural competence and
BRAVE NEW LIFEWORLDS 73
second language identity is language learners’ ability to mediate and ‘bro-

ker’ between cultures whilst adopting different roles within homogeneous
national cultures. Even though more recently the notion of the ‘symbolic
space’ has acknowledged learners’ possibility to inhabit an alternative
abstract space (Kramsch 2009), this chapter will discuss the possibility of
a new relationship of the language learner towards the target culture, one
that will see the learner in constant travel, movement and metamorphosis
through cultures.
But as language educators have pointed out, language learners are still
imagined as pawns in the game of native speakers, who have greater power
and prestige (Coffey 2010; Gray 2012). Language learners are meant to
inhabit a largely illegitimate in-between space, always defined in terms of
its relationship with the native speakers’ world, where there are no semi-
otic resources to build a personal itinerary or individually organised col-
lection of experiences to construct an intimate ‘home world’. Whether
they are believed to be successful second or additional language learners,
or speakers of a lingua franca (Jenkins, J. Cogo, A. and Dewey, M. 2011),
language ‘users’ are not commonly defined through their alliances or sense
of belonging to a particular culture but their mastery of a new language.
Within this view, representations of the multilingual subject miss out on
the extraordinary and the mundane in the day-to-day cultural experi-
ences of the language learner, and their potential for cultural renewal and
transformation. Within this state of affairs, the language learner is often
defined in reference to a limited set of interpretations and fantasies of what
a ‘native speaker’ is expected to look like and embody—an increasingly
aspirational world (Gray 2012). Language learners’ desires and aspirations
are constantly interpreted with idealised and utopian cultural worlds as
a goal. Whether they were immigrant language learners, contesting and
struggling to be heard in kitchens and cafés populated by a native speak-
ers’ world (Norton 2000), or more privileged subjects who conjure up
worlds of pleasure and escapism (Kramsch 2009; Coffey 2010), the lan-
guage learner has mostly been imagined and located in a native speaker’s
stylised space.
Whereas research into second language identity has taken great strides
in legitimising the identity of the second language learner, this research
has mainly taken place in the context of English and the generalised
assumption that learners of English wish to be accepted in old and well-
established communities of practice. It is a relationship with a power
imbalance where the non-native speaker is answerable to and looks up to
74 C. ROS I SOLÉ
the native speaker, and the language learner seeks legitimacy and citizen-
ship in the native speaker’s kingdom. Indeed, the language learner’s only
option is to inhabit an idealised national culture, or a partial version of
it. The reconceptualisation of the language learner’s identity I propose
here adds to previous theorisations in that it problematises a language
learner’s subjective cultural experience but also offers an alternative cul-
tural horizon created for the language learner’s own consumption and
manipulation. As language learners are allowed to look beyond linguistic
proficiency, and they reflect on their selves, their own biographies and per-
sonal desires, they begin to build their own subjectivities, which may also
entail unexpected cultural ‘stops’ within their personal itineraries. Here,
language learners can face and wrestle with new issues in the language
learning experience: issues of belonging or exclusion to a particular cul-
tural group rather than just linguistic proficiency (Busch 2014).
Dwelling in another language

The ackward and playful adjusting and stumbling in another languaculture
has been theorised by Phipps (2007) in her notion of ‘dwelling’. She has
made an important distinction between the heavy-laden and stilted idea
of intercultural communication and the more nimble and fluid notion of
‘dwelling’ in another culture. Experiencing another culture is not nec-
essarily about ‘cultural learning’, about learning the right protocol for
behaving in another language, or the learning of detached facts that lead
us to some model of behaviour and cultural nirvana of smooth and spot-
less intercultural communication. Instead, dwelling is about flowing in
another culture, about knowing ‘what the right kinds of coffee [there] are
to order, how to eat the cakes, how to use the serviettes, how to count
with one’s fingers and thumbs’ (p. 154) is about focusing on ‘languaging’
and the sociality of language learning, dwelling ‘keeps the misunderstand-
ing and stumbling in the relationship’ (p. 154). The surprise and playful
factor, the social tasting and the focus on social flow is what dwelling in a
language is about. Language learning goes from fetish cultural knowledge
that supposedly opens cultural worlds (i.e., to order the right kind of cof-
fee or cake in a shop), to messy tasting of words and going along with
the playfulness of new social situations. Similar to Deleuze and Guatarri’s
(2004) dense and unpredictable trajectories and networks of organic rhi-
zomes (mentioned in Chap. 4), dwelling does not take us to fixed simple
cultural worlds, but to ordinary places that have been translated by the
body into something new and non-transferable.
It is this light intercultural flowing, the dwelling in the being immersed

and unconscious stumbling into one’s own version of another language
and culture that I refer to.
Lifeworlds and Spracherleben

Language learners’ personal worlds lend themselves to be defined by the
metaphor of lifeworlds. This links the newly acquired identity and ‘figu-
ration’ (see Chap. 4) of the language learner within a spatio-temporal
coordinate, independent of national cultures. By looking at language
learners’ sense of place and ownership in a multilingual and cosmopolitan
world, the new space inhabited by the language learner challenges lin-
ear modernist understandings of cultures that rely on one language, one
nation solutions. Even poststructuralist approaches to identity that allow
for more fluid and dynamic positions for the language learner do not do
justice to language learners’ complex constructions of their own cultural
worlds and itineraries. In order to construct a more elaborate account of
language learners’ worlds, I will argue for a definition of language learn-
ers’ spaces that goes beyond ‘third’ or ‘symbolic’ spaces, and one that
provides a more autonomous and unpredictable position for the learner.
This is a space that is contingent on the locality and the terrains on which
the learner treads. I will argue that with his/her rootlessness and cul-
tural liminality, and multiple and fragmented self, the language learner is
compelled to reject being fixed in a place and instead adopts a nomadic
lifestyle. In this way, language learners are not seen as lacking geographi-
cal co-ordinates, or as culturally ‘homeless’, but individuals who have
turned this round and by using their creativity have been able to free
themselves from the determinisms of firmly delineated cultures and their
societies. In this way, language learners have the possibility to use their
imaginations and affect to create for themselves cultural worlds that will
not be grounded in any single territory but rather will be ‘in flight’ and
in constant transformation.
In order to explore these deterritorialised, nomadic worlds that the lan-
guage learner inhabits, I draw on an idea of culture that does not depend
on political and objective boundaries, but rather on intersubjective and
personally experienced ones. This will be based on Husserl’s notion of
lifeworlds (Husserl 1954/1970). Husserl’s idea of lifeworlds signifies
the way individuals structure the world into objects that are then used
to ‘pre-delineate’ a horizon of possible future experience. The lifeworld
76 C. ROS I SOLÉ
is the structure upon which language learners can construct meanings,

relationships and moral judgements. These lifeworlds are personally con-
structed intersubjective spheres (see Chap. 4 for a discussion on ‘intersub-
jectivity’). Such a concept is useful to illustrate how language learners can
build their own moral compass through the learning of a new language
by consciously assembling a system of beliefs that justifies and guides their
behaviour. The lifeworld then provides the ‘base’, the canvas, on which
the language learner’s life is drawn.
Complementary to the concept of the lifeworld, is the notion of
Spracherleben’ (the lived experience of language) (Busch 2014) which
allows us to create an alternative notion of the native speaker world. The
notion of Spracherleben also extends the phenomenological approach to
the subject (proposed in Chap. 4) which emphasises the primacy of per-
ception over reason, the link between body and mind, and the concept of
‘body memory’, which will point towards the importance of personal expe-
rience and biography in the creation of subjectively meaningful worlds.
body memory forms an ensemble of predispositions and potentials for per-

ceiving the world, for social action, communication, and desire. It functions
as an intersubjective system, in which bodily patterns of interacting with
others are established and constantly updated, from childhood onwards. If
we conceive language as part of this body memory, it becomes possible to
understand repertoire in its biographical dimension, as a structure bearing
the traces of past experience of situated interactions, and of the everyday lin-
guistic practices derived from this experience, a structure that is constantly
present in our current linguistic perceptions, interpretations and actions,
and is simultaneously directed forwards, anticipating future situations and
events we are preparing to face.
(Busch 2014: 11)
Such a view of the language learner world adds to the personal approaches
to the learner already outlined by Norton’s (2000) and Kramsch’s (2009)
work and their different conceptualisations of language learners’ subjec-
tivity. Their views, whilst firmly anchored in an emic perspective of the
language learner, denote a transcendental and ideal view of the world (i.e.,
one that transcends our own experience) where the new language is ‘out
there’, an objective and rational idea rather than the product of our own
experience. Whilst Kramsch’s symbolic aspect of language is presented as
a conscious perception of the world, this is situated in a world of repre-
sentations and metaphorical meanings that depart from the immediate
and perceptual in the language learner’s experience. However, Norton

and Kramsch’s poststructuralist and symbolic theorisations of the subject
made possible a change of focus from a view of the learner as an apprentice
and subject without agency, typical of cognitive approaches, to a view that
embraces the fluidity and situatedness of the language learning experience.
Whilst the phenomenological approach taken in this book, and applied
to the lifeworlds in this chapter, builds on Norton’s (2000) and Kramsch’s
(2009) conceptualisation of subjectivity, it departs from it in that the
imagined or ‘lived’ community of the target language (rather than some
objective reality of a culture or a representation of it) is the subject of
study, and it is both subversive and contingent on the determinisms of
social life whilst being able to subvert social norms and intellectual mean-
ings. Language learners then are allowed to submit to or contest old
meanings through their dwelling in the world.
The lifeworld is an intimate and personal world that is not conceived
unless it is experienced by the learner both subjectively and intersubjec-
tively, and apprehended through perception (whether real or imagined).
It is non-transferable as it exists only in the conscious perception or imagi-
nation of the learner. The world of the language learner does not only
exist in the imagination, in some symbolic relationship with reality, but
it may also be constructed and experienced in the ordinary, in the ‘here
and now’, and in the unpredictable and constantly changing lives of the
language learner.
The notions of lifeworld and Spracherleben become a useful theoreti-
cal framework to build the tempo-spatial coordinates in which nomadic
language learners move and construct their unique versions of their mul-
tilingual lived worlds. In order to do this, this chapter will scrutinise the
horizons of four language learners’ experiences, their ‘lived’ worlds, the
background and circumstances in which language learners function, and
the spheres that they construct for themselves to create a space where they
can experiment with their own new versions of the world. These nomadic
worlds present an intersubjective plane where change takes place in syn-
ergy and empathy with the Other, and where experiences and emotions
are shaped. Language is not only acquired, but performed and lived later-
ally, in empathy and solidarity with the first language and second language
speakers of the target language. Language learners will not just project
their versions of the language onto the language experience, but they can
co-construct the experience in deep connection and understanding of the
Other. It is the reaching out to ‘the other’, the intersubjectivity in language
78 C. ROS I SOLÉ
learning, that will mark out a personal approach to language learning from
an ‘objective’, transcendental and detached one. The nomadic language
learner’s aim is not to ‘integrate’ into the other culture, to be tied up to
a single locality and social norm, but to be free to move around, to be in
transit in a constant process of becoming.
To illustrate these complex and intense lifeworlds I will give an account
of four language learners of three different languages, Catalan, Arabic
and Serbian/Croatian, that tell us about their idiosyncratic, intimate and
fleeting worlds. These language learners have embraced new languages
and new cultures and have constructed their own subjective nomadic
road maps and figurations of the target language. These stories are woven
together based on a series of narratives and vignettes built from their per-
sonal diaries and interviews over a period of six months. These narratives
are not direct, objective reflections of their lives but are narratives that
interpret, reflect upon, give coherence and establish a direction for the
future (Bruner 2001).
I will first talk about two learners of Catalan. The first is John, whose
landscapes and tastes bear traces of things past and make him draw on
the sensual and mythic aspects of language learning. The second is Marie,
another Catalan enthusiast, who can be better described as a moral-
ist whose ethical goal is that of making English-speaking people more
aware and respectful of other languages and cultures. Then I will describe
Weronika, a student of Croatian and Serbian who provides another fasci-
nating account of how language learning touches our inner worlds from
both aesthetic and ethical points of view. Weronika has an ethical and polit-
ical project, that of redefining the cultural identity of Croatia, a country
immersed in a nation-building project. Finally, I will give the example of a
learner of Arabic, Antonia, who is interested in Arabic for self-cultivation
and for aesthetic reasons (art for art’s sake), which includes her own ver-
sion of the Middle East.
Let’s then turn to our language learners and their lifeworlds: (1) John
(a student of Catalan), (2) Marie (a student of Catalan), (3) Weronika (a
student of Serbian/Croatian) and (4) Antonia (a student of Arabic).
1. John’s mythic world
John is a middle-aged businessman studying Catalan in a language

institute in London. He likes visiting Barcelona, where Catalan is spoken,
and Mallorca, one of the Balearic Islands where a variety of Catalan is also
spoken. In his interview, John explains how he feels at home in Barcelona,

as it reminds him of the South of France. Languages are not a problem for
John, who learnt French at home and has good knowledge of two other
European languages, Italian and Greek. Like many of today’s language
learners, John is a multilingual individual who is adding another string to
his already accomplished linguistic bow. Multilingualism and a variety of
cultural affiliations are part of his identity as a learner. He brings to the
language learning experience a rich and complex linguistic cultural capital.
John’s three main interests when he talks about Catalan are music, walk-
ing in Mallorca and food. John is a keen walker who does a bit of research
on the country he is going to visit and plans his routes in detail before
travelling. He likes to fully integrate into the culture by talking to people,
sampling their food and admiring the landscape. Although John is not so
keen on urban life and its cultural and sensual offerings, he passionately
engages in the appreciation of the countryside.
For John, Catalan makes him feel both comfortable and intellectually
fulfilled, but for him learning Catalan is more than that; it has a special
personal meaning. John’s version of Catalan touches his affective imagina-
tion by transporting him into the pleasures of some mythic past, his child-
hood and the landscape of the South of France.
I feel very comfortable in South West France and actually find going to
Barcelona (and I have only been there a couple of times). But I find, I just
feel very at home there. I find I can understand how the city works. […] I
mean, apart from the quite relaxed lifestyle, the art side of things it’s … Is
a culture that seems to value art and music highly. And also food of course.
Which is a subject very dear to my heart.
(John’s interview, lines 40–66)
For John the learning of Catalan is embedded in pleasurable sensations and

images that are impregnated with meaning. Like the tasting of Proust’s
madeleine, the sensation brought about by learning Catalan becomes the
essence of his nostalgia for his childhood in the South of France. The
French writer Marcel Proust (1871–1922) is well known for capturing the
powerful feeling of nostalgia that sensual experiences can provoke. In his
memoir Remembrance of things past he described how eating a madeleine
evoked intense memories of the smells and experiences of his childhood.
Whereas Proust’s famous episode was not written in the context of lan-
guage learning, a similar feeling of nostalgia can be said to be experienced
80 C. ROS I SOLÉ
by language learners who can recall feelings and sensations experienced

in another language by retrieving them through ordinary objects. Like
the nostalgic and evocative value of Proust’s madeleine, the sensations
evoked by living other languages can also be built through objects and
the experiences they ‘impress’ on our bodies. So that whilst seemingly
having a casual connection with the present and the ordinary of the target
language, we are constantly entering into a relationship with other objects
and people that form intense networks with our private worlds and our
Spracherleben. The experiences that remind us of things past, however,
can either make us feel at home by making us think of a past we long
for, a mythic past, or can alienate us from another language by bringing
unwanted memories.
But John’s attitude towards language is not the one usually portrayed
in educational discourses and their monolingual approaches to culture.
John does not portray himself as an ambassador of a well-known brand of
British culture or a lover of all things Catalan, a ‘Catalonophile’. Rather,
he feels at home in his own version of Catalan culture. He also does not
position himself in either culture. He describes Catalonia in reference
to other cultures that he knows, such as French, Italian and Greek, and
places Barcelona in that cosmopolitan frame of reference. In the following
extract he talks about this cosmopolitan linage and progressive transfor-
mation of the self:
my grandfather was a negociant first of all in Bordeaux and then in Burgundy

[…]. So I never really knew him. But my mother spoke French with him and
I was brought up in a household full of languages and wandered quite a bit.
So I found French quite easy.
John does not use the learning of Catalan to access a cultural ‘world of
privilege’ (Coffey 2010). Indeed, language is not seen as a ‘luxury’, but
a way to tap into a more authentic and peaceful existence. He feels nos-
talgia for an unmodernised society that values a more sensual and relaxed
lifestyle. He idealises Catalan life (through his experience of Mallorca) as
one of simplicity, one that could possibly have been found in Britain a
long time ago. The wholesome and uncomplicated life of rural bliss, ‘one
which harks back to a straightforward, timeless way of conducting one’s
life, a trope of the discourse common to much travel writing’ (Beaven
2007: 195).
Indeed, John mystifies Catalan culture and traditions by discussing

his natural inclination towards the ‘ideal’ Catalan way of life, which he
believes is a relaxed and worry-free world with no time pressure and plenty
of time for an after lunch nap (migdiada).
It’s very relaxed and I have a possibility, because I can work anywhere in the
world for the partnership I work in, it is quite realistic to … in a year or so
to move out to Barcelona and spend three weeks of each month there and a
week travelling, which would work for me. And I would be travelling mainly
back to the UK […] (7:48) because the weather is good and the culture is
just my ideal. I’m not particularly bothered about getting up late. That suits
me quite well. My ideal working time would be four o’clock in the after-
noon until about midnight. So, the culture works quite well for me there.
Cristina—That would be ideal […]
John—And I love the idea of the ‘migdiada’.
Cristina—Me too! […]
John—The fact that there is a word for it as well. It’s wonderful!
John associates Catalan with the taste of good food and wine in France,
makes associations with the music he heard as a young man and the coun-
tryside he experienced as a child in the South of France. These associations
are personally created worlds, different from the socially determined and
images of the target culture usually manufactured by language courses, of
holidays in the sun and touristic sights. Rather, John’s lifeworld is a more
intimate assemblage of beliefs (e.g., life should be simple and uncom-
plicated) that guides his moral compass and his behaviours: his love for
music, walks in the countryside and leisured meals.
Indeed, John has consciously assembled these beliefs and rituals over a
life trajectory where there is a personal connection to the Mediterranean
and its sensual pleasures. John’s grandfather was a wine merchant (a nego-
ciant) who knew well the beautiful vineyard landscapes of the South of
France, and John sees in Mallorca a natural extension to that landscape.
We could argue that for John, Catalan is a way of continuing the fam-
ily saga of cosmopolitan and Mediterranean lifestyle that his grandfather
forged. With Catalan, John has not only rediscovered the mythical place of
his childhood but he is forging a new trajectory out of his Spracherleben.
It will be the combination of the Mallorcan experiences and body memo-
ries and of his relationships with his relatives in France that will form the
horizon of John’s lifeworld.
82 C. ROS I SOLÉ
John’s idealised version of Catalan culture is not an unusual feature

in narratives of language learners and individuals who cross cultural
boundaries (Coffey and Street 2008; Coffey 2013), even in long-estab-
lished boundary-crossers like himself. Language learners may persist in
their romanticised (and perhaps naïve) views of the target culture that
paint rose-tinted lifeworld canvases. But these are not generic and socially
determined views of the culture, but personally constructed ones, which
nonetheless choose to keep a mythic version of the culture.
John keeps his zest for Catalan language and culture by nurturing this
romantic image of Catalonia and Mallorca. He uses social sites on the
internet to meet Catalan speakers in an attempt to carry a slice of Catalan
culture to his daily life in Britain. His relationship with the language and
culture, therefore, is not one that is purely utopian and transcendental, but
one that is based on an experiential version of the culture. Importantly,
John’s world is not an ‘off-the-peg’ Catalan lifestyle that he has bought
into, but rather, a contingent self-made world. John’s own lifeworld
and Spracherleben is populated by a barrage of memories, characters and
images that have allowed him to trace a very personal Catalan trajectory
that has connected his sensual present with a more abstract mythic past.
2. Marie’s mobile Catalan home
[The] undertaking is … to allow each of your Royal Highness’ subjects

to be educated (gebildet) to be moral men and good citizens (sittlichen
Menschen und guten Bürger) … The following must therefore be achieved;
that with the method of instruction one cares not that this or that be learned;
but rather that in learning memory be exercised, understanding sharpened,
judgment rectified, and moral feeling (sittliche Gefühl) refined.
(Humboldt,1903–1936 in Bohlin 2013: 393)
The above quote reminds us of the lofty ideals of an education for self-
cultivation. Marie shows how language learning can be used as a beacon,
a moral crusade in which the goal is to not only to educate yourself but
also your fellow countryfolk. Marie is a young professional woman who
has built her own moral lifeworld and personal Spracherleben out of her
moral belief that English people should know about the fate of Catalonian
people and their language. She presents the learning of Catalan as a way of
cultivating her character and that of others through making them aware of
other languages, in particular minority languages. She believes that people
should learn languages and know about other cultures different from their
own:
I don’t have any religious beliefs but I do feel learning a language like
Catalan is a great way to educate people on the difference between this and
Spanish. I love the fact that small communities use their own language or
dialects and keep them alive. I think from a moral point of view it’s ignorant
for the English to assume everyone will speak their language and even learn-
ing a few phrases can show you’ve made the effort.
(Marie’s diary, p. 4).
Marie, learns Catalan not only because of her love for all things Catalan,
but also because of a personal moral crusade. She wants to show her
respect and recognition of other languages, other ways of life and other
values, and wants others to do the same. She develops for herself the role
of ambassador of a more cosmopolitan multilingual English speaker and
a defender of minority languages such as Catalan. Like John, Marie’s life-
world is mainly constructed not in the target country, but from a distance
and a personally crafted space that only she and her language occupy. She
locates this world in the centre of London where she also studied Romance
languages (French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese) at university. Later
on, Marie picked Catalan because of the appeal of Catalan culture and,
in particular, Barcelona. After a couple of visits to Barcelona, she fell in
love with the city and its iconic and most famous exports: Gaudí art and
Catalan food. So as well as a moral dimension to her interest, there is also
a passion for the more sensual aspects of Catalan culture.
Marie appears to classify Catalan as some sort of pleasurable secret
hobby, a mobile home that she carries around with her. But Catalan is
not only a prosthesis of the self that aids and punctuates her daily life. It
is more than a slogan of solidarity and empathy for other languages and
other peoples that she carries wherever she goes; she also feels aesthetically
attracted to Catalan.
Mary’s love of the Catalan modernist architecture of the Sagrada Familia
church is not unique, judging by the multitude of visits that this building
receives from tourists every year. But it is the assiduity with which she visits
and the affect that has gradually grown on her that is noteworthy. Mary
has not only visited and enjoyed Gaudí’s buildings but she seems to follow
their progress as if they were part of the family. Indeed, the image of the
Sagrada Familia church seems to carry an intensive affective dimension.
84 C. ROS I SOLÉ
Yeah, I suppose it’s the obvious thing, but the Gaudi stuff. It’s so amazing
and so different and everything. It kind of blows you away … so … It’s just
amazing to look at it. The Sagrada Familia, I have been there … I have been
to Barcelona four times and each time you see the Sagrada Familia it is more
and more completed. The first time I went it was only a hole in the ground.
In the middle, it was like a pit. And now it’s like you got all the workmen
in the middle doing the detail and everything and doing the glass, so every
time I go back it’s a bit more completed and it’s amazing to watch.
(Marie’s interview, lines 60–69)
Marie’s access to Catalan culture goes beyond the local community to

include the Catalan virtual community. By being an expert and assiduous
user of the internet, Marie regularly downloads podcasts and listens to
them while in the gym or on the Tube, watches Catalan TV in her work
break on the internet and sends emails in Catalan.
I am regularly downloading podcasts from TV3, the Catalan TV station

called ‘Tres minuts’ which are short summaries of the news. I find it useful
for more advanced listening practice. I find my knowledge of Spanish does
help a lot as I can get the gist. I quite often watch this at the gym or on the
tube to work.
(Marie’s diary, p. 13)
Marie’s interest in Catalan seeps into her daily life and is shaped by what
she does and where she does it. She finds this mobility and flexibility to
learn ‘on-the-go’ an aid and a newly found pleasure in language learning.
She relishes the associations that she makes between learning a new word
and the place she is located:
I like the way I can remember sometimes exactly where/when I learnt a

phrase. There might be a silly story attached to learning it […].
(Marie’s diary, p. 13)
This view of Catalan culture is a deterritorialised one which lives both in

the imagination and also as a progressive subversion of social rules and
understandings of what a learner of Catalan should be. Marie does not
identify Catalan with a particular territory which identifies Catalan with
a Catalan nation; rather, sometimes it is represented by a city, Barcelona,
other times by an online community. Rather than having a language con-
nected to a particular nation, Marie shows how languages can also be
attached to particular language experiences and Spracherleben. Marie con-

ceives Catalan language and culture as away from the modernist n ationalist
paradigms of one language, one nation that permeates much current lan-
guage pedagogy (Risager 2007; Starkey 2010; Stougaard-Nielsen 2010).
For Marie, Catalan is not located in some distant land, but rather, as stated
earlier, it is like a mobile home, a caravan full of memories and experiences
that she carries around wherever she goes. Learning Catalan is not escap-
ism, but the experiencing of the language in particular spatio-temporal
co-ordinates.
For Marie, learning Catalan is both public (her zest for making the des-
tiny of Catalan culture and language understood) and private. This is pat-
ent in her relationship with her mobile device, which allows her to sneak
in bite-sized Catalan language podcasts whenever she can and wherever
she goes. By doing this, she not only consumes Catalan culture, but she
infuses it with new meanings by locating and personalising her learning
with purpose and affect. Marie does not limit herself to borrowing from
other versions of Catalan, but she makes it more personally meaningful
by forging new unexpected connections whilst carrying Catalan around
with her, and making it part of her repertoire of life memories and body
memories. She builds her own lifeworld out of her privately fashioned
Catalan experiences.
3. Weronika’s nomadic life
Weronika is a PhD student of Croatian Gender and Nationalism, and

on the surface, she is a classic case of studying a language in order to
gain access to the culture. On a deeper level, however, she is a complex
individual with a multilayered lifeworld. A highly educated multilingual
individual (as well as her native Polish, and having lived in Holland, she
speaks Dutch and German), she has no difficulties in feeling at ease in the
company of the Croatian diaspora in London. Weronika not only stud-
ies Croatian, but she lives it though her Croatian friendships. She does
her homework and goes out for dinner with them whilst sampling differ-
ent aspects of Croatian culture. This social aspect of Weronika’s language
learning not only entails sensually pleasurable activities such as dining out,
but it also involves engaging with history and politics. Although by no
means advanced, Weronika is learning the language and simultaneously
trying to understand the recent traumatic history of the Balkan region.
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An interesting story was published today in the Polish daily newspaper,

Gazeta Wyborcza. It was a short story written by a post-Yugoslav author.
Although clearly linked to Christmas, it was neither joyful, nor merry (a
strong contrast to all the Santa Claus comedies on the telly). An old lady
is struggling with her memory, which although vivid, and unfailing when
recalling youth, falters around the time of the war. The 1990s war as an
experience and memory now affects all her other recollections. She can’t
remember having children and grandchildren – for who would decide to
give birth amidst the cruelty of the war? Yet again, the topic of the war
and its aftermath proves the main if not solitary theme around which post-
Yugoslavian literature centres.
(Weronika’s diary, p. 15)
Such an interest in political and polemic subjects contrasts with the sani-
tised versions of culture presented to language learners where politics and
controversial subjects are absent from language learning textbooks (Ros i
Solé 2013). But Weronika is not only interested in Croatian politics as an
objective subject, but as a personal quest for meaning in another culture.
As her teacher pointed out to me, Weronika’s interest in politics is not
only from discussing ideas with no relation to what she experiences, rather
she is very much involved in the observation of the day-to-day lives of
Croatian people and their communities. She self-consciously mixes ordi-
nary life events, such as the ritual of having a sit-down meal, with politics.
She uses it as a strategy to imagine her horizons and 'strips of reality' for
her lifeworld. She lives Croatian culture not only at the intellectual but
also at the sensual level, and she seamlessly weaves the two in her accounts.
Her description of her culinary experiences and the embodiment of lan-
guage in food is another example of Weronika’s connections with culture.
In the following extract, she makes a connection between Eastern Europe
and her present Western world through the vegetable box that she gets
delivered to her flat in London.
Having come back from London, I received the regular order of my fruit and
veg box. And I found, amongst other things, the January King cabbage – at
least I think that is how it is called. And I found myself planning to make
Sarma – a Balkan speciality, which is made by wrapping meat and rice filling
in cooked cabbage leaves. This dish is found in almost all central European
countries existing as Goła ̨bki in Poland and Kohlrouladen in Germany. But
as I was looking up the recipes for Sarma on the internet I remembered its
texture and taste as I ate it in Bosnian restaurants in Sarajevo. It was perfect.
Weronika’s story is one not often told in accounts of second language

learning. Her seamless weaving of abstract concepts such as history and
politics with more sensual and anecdotal references to the ordinary day-
to-day living uncovers interesting aspects about the learning of languages
and cultures within a phenomenological framework where experience
takes precedence over thought and more objective representations of cul-
tures. The inclusion of descriptions of meals with side-by-side reflections
on the culture shows the importance of the personal and sensory experi-
ence in language learning, and how it helps her construct her own images
and representation of Croatian culture.
4. Antonia’s cultivation of the self
Antonia is a Romanian student of Arabic, who came to the UK to

work as a journalist for a Scottish newspaper. Antonia comes across as
a strong and extraordinary character in her achievements as an addi-
tional language learner. She is now pursuing a new degree in English
(an MA in International Relations) while combining it with her studies
in Arabic. A general trend in Antonia’s life is overcoming adversity and
difficult circumstances with great commitment and success. For exam-
ple, she mastered English to the extent that she became an English-
writing journalist, and now she wants to embark on a new journey with
the learning of Arabic.
But Antonia’s use of languages as paths for self-cultivation has not
always been positive. While in her Romanian hometown, Antonia went
to a German school where she felt alienated and unhappy. That experi-
ence resulted in her developing negative feelings towards German despite
retaining an admiration for its culture.
I was very miserable and even now I have this aversion towards the German
language, even though I shouldn’t. Because it’s a great culture.
(Antonia’s interview, line 63)
Her negative experience with German culture, however, did not affect
her thirst and passion for learning about other cultures and languages.
Rather, it seemed to make her more determined to use languages as a way
to improve her education and develop her character.
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Antonia does not only pursue language learning inside the traditional
classroom but she takes her learning outside the lessons. She constantly
finds tasks to do around the Arabic language, working out rules, for
example, and is also a highly motivated student who, like many Arabic stu-
dents, had a comprehensive knowledge of the culture before she embarked
on her language studies.
Her previous encounters with the language and culture were travel-
ling to Arabic-speaking countries in the Middle East and reading litera-
ture on the Arab world. This allowed her to build her own version of
‘Arabic’, whose main focus was the Middle East and how the Arabic lan-
guage influenced the region over the centuries. She traces the path of
Arabic in the Middle East, her definition of the ‘Arabic world’ including
countries where Arabic is spoken today, but also those countries (mainly
in the Middle East) where Arabic had an influence, for example regions of
the Ottoman Empire when Constantinople was the hub of Arab culture.
Antonia also read around the beginnings of Arabic in Ancient Semitic
languages such as Babylonian and Assyrian.
I also read a book by a linguist and former mathematician Guy Deutscher

who decided to do a PhD in ancient Semitic languages: Babylonian and
Assyrian quite late in life. It was in this book that I first came across the
structure of Semitic languages and was fascinated with their structures and
virtually infinite possibilities of creating words.
(Antonia’s diary, pp. 3–4)
Her interest and knowledge about Arabic is not limited to finding the path
of Arabic language and culture through the Middle East from Babylonian
times, its encounter with the Ottoman Empire and today’s strategic posi-
tion in the Middle East and the world. She also engages with investigating
the structures and etymology of the language.
Antonia’s fascination with Arabic is also born out of an interest in the
clash of Western and ‘oriental’ cultures and the place of Romanian cul-
ture in it. This is why for her Arab culture mainly refers to the Middle
East region (rather than other Arab-speaking cultures in Africa) which she
equates with the Other and non-Western world. Owing to its links with
the Ottoman Empire, she also includes Turkey in the non-Western world.
Her ambition is to get to know this ‘Arab’ region and its culture. She feels
that in order to do this, it is not enough to read about it in English or
other European languages; she has to experience it in her own skin.
Contrary to current conceptualisations of language learning (notably

Communicative Language Teaching), her fascination with the language
is not born out of her desire to socialise with speakers of the language.
On the contrary, it bypasses the need to communicate with others to con-
centrate on the form of the language and its system. When she meets
an Arabic speaker in her students’ Halls of Residence, rather than being
interested in the person, she uses him to acquire new knowledge about
language itself:
I met an Iraqui guy at the residence. I’m going to make good use of his
knowledge of Arabic. If only I could be fluent. Gosh, that would be some-
thing. At the end of this term I feel I have made small progress in learning
the language. I hope by the time I finish the next term it will be even better.
I don’t know, we’ll see.
(Antonia’s diary, p. 19)
As well as tracing the history of the Arabic language in the Middle East,
Antonia wants to see how she personally relates to all this. Her quest is
one of finding her position in the world in relation to Arabic culture,
and she does this by looking at any connections she might find between
Romania and Arabic. Antonia’s learning trajectory, then is not one that
sits comfortably with instrumental and pragmatic discourses and educa-
tional ideologies that stress learning a language for travelling, doing tour-
ism or business, rather, it calls on more liberal-humanist philosophies of
learning that emphasise the development of the person and the cultivation
of the self.
Nomadic Lifeworlds
The language learner tries to make sense of her experiences and make
an identity, a project, a lifestyle and a lifeworld. Like a detective, the lan-
guage learner assembles and orders the clues and the traces of a culture:
the similarities between words in the two languages, the rituals and street
signs, the smells, tastes and new colour hues for his/her extraordinary,
unexpected—if often silenced—world. A new lifeworld canvas, a horizon
that the language learner carefully creates for his/herself and will struc-
ture his/her language learning experience, whether it takes the form of
Antonia’s cultivation of the self, Marie’s mobile home, John’s engagement
with a mythical world or Weronika’s nomadic transformations of the self.
90 C. ROS I SOLÉ
These intimate spheres are mythical places conjured up by individu-

als’ imaginations. But they are also populated by the here and now, by
objects and mundane rituals and experiences.. Multilingual subjects have
a range of ways of inhabiting these new worlds, from the exotic experi-
ence gleaned by the tourist gaze (Urry 1990) of the highly mobile indi-
vidual, to the cosmopolitan and privileged lives of the learners portrayed
here, to the arduous passage that the undocumented migrant endures.
Notwithstanding people’s backgrounds or trajectories, language learning
can serve a transformative purpose of the self (McNamara 2013), can urge
learners to escape and project romantic cultural ideals onto the target lan-
guage (Coffey and Street 2008; Piller and Takahashi 2006; Ros i Solé
2013) or provide intensive experiences in the here and now, whether these
are pleasurable or troublesome (Cooke 2015).
Indeed, learning a new language is not merely about accessing and
discovering generic cultures with a disengaged distance. The language
learner engages with what he/she sees and feels and seeks a private and
intersubjective consciousness of the culture. The imagining and cultural
constructions are diverse formations that do not only seek to please some-
body else’s expectations, but rather they are also created for one’s own
consumption. Viewed in this way, language learners’ identities and worlds
do not come out of the language experience untouched. They are not
just casual sojourners or settlers of the culture, but nomads who embrace
difference as an affirmative force and enter into a dynamic flux of succes-
sive becomings.
The new meanings of the additional language are contingent on the
locality of the language experience, but are not arbitrary; they trace back
to past experiences, biographies and body memories. And yet additional
languages are often distilled by educators and publishing houses into ver-
sions that have generic and closed meanings, specific ideologies, prejudices
and ethical stances. Indeed, learners do not encounter ideologically and
symbol-free languages and cultures; rather, they may face unsettling truths
about social practices and rituals that may be incommensurable with those
of the learner (O’Regan 2013). They may also have to face prejudices
about the target culture transmitted through the emotions silenced in the
classroom (Charalambous 2013) or uncover troubled and conflicted lives.
Indeed, crossing language boundaries is not only about the celebration of
difference and desire, it can also be a painful experience that breaks open
comfortable and safe worlds.
This chapter has argued that by repositioning learners not only in ref-
erence to native speakers but also in reference to their own worlds, we
can arrive at a more accurate account of language learners’ realities and
subjectivities: one where language learners engage in a quest for their own
personal spaces not in order to legitimise their voices against those of
the target speakers as Norton’s pioneer work on language learners’ iden-
tity argued (Norton 2000, 2012), but also to reflect on and enrich their
lives, and construct intercultural worlds that nourish the individual. Here,
not only economic investments and pragmatic considerations were of
importance, but intersubjectivity and renewal of the self. Learners thus
appear as confident individuals who have a desire and a need to engage
with language and culture in a purposeful and personally meaningful way.
These learner vignettes have shown that, if allowed to do so, multilingual
subjects have rich lives that rebel and create new meanings out of the
mundane and seemingly banal. They develop their own versions of the
culture that do not necessarily involve the linguistic. Rather it involves
more affective and personal aspects of communication that contribute to
the building of personal worlds. This deep synergy with the additional
language will guide language learners’ paths and movement within the
culture. It will tell them when to join or retreat from the other culture,
when to keep or break silence, and when to belong or distance themselves
from new worlds.
Language learners’ Spracherleben are to be found in tourist encounters
in distant lands; in Jordan or Mallorca, in language textbooks or the veg-
etable box delivered to our homes. But they are also to be found in the
ordinary routines of the Serbian community centres, where groups of peo-
ple perform and negotiate linguistic and cultural meanings. It is in such
specific localities and encounters that language learners shape their ver-
sions of the culture. They are situations and intimate spaces that are made
up of ordinary and bizarre encounters with the target culture outside the
boundaries of territorialised cultures, where memories and fantasies infuse
reality in different gradients and constantly transform language learners’
lifeworlds in unpredictable ways.
A teacher in a Croatian class once told me that students of Croatian mix

politics with jeans and tights, one minute they talk about the zakon (law),
another about politika (politics), and another about mini sujka (mini-skirt).
(Fieldnotes, Ros i Solé 2012: 96)
92 C. ROS I SOLÉ
This is not such an unusual occurrence, but at the same time, this is not
how language learning is being represented in public discourses and,
indeed, how language has been studied in SLA. The lifeworlds of language
learners have mostly been silenced, even if language learners are quietly
rebelling under the surface creating their own dreams, figurations and
lifeworlds to live by.
Language learners not only ‘live’ but they ‘dwell’ in language (Phipps
2007) in the daily goings on at the boundaries of the body. It is the body
and its boundaries rather than the mind that acts as the nexus between the
language learner’s self and society. The sociality of the language learner’s
experience crystallises on an embodied and affective plane where learners
make sense and decide what counts as their lifeworld. In the next chapter
I will be talking about the emotional life of the language learner and the
pain and pleasure involved in living and learning languages.
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CHAPTER 6
The Social Promise of Emotions
Abstract This chapter challenges how the notion of affect has tradition-
ally been conceptualised in Second Language Acquisition (SLA): a ‘filter’
that determines success or failure in language learning. Instead emo-
tions are seen as embodied and creative experiences that allow the indi-
vidual to experiment with their views of themselves and of the world.
Emotions become key to unlock language learners’ inner worlds through
social engagement in the new situations of the additional language. This
reconceptualisation of emotions builds on the work by critical language
educator Sarah Benesch (2012: Considering emotions in critical English
language teaching: Theories and Praxis. London: Routledge), cultural
theorist Sarah Ahmed (2004: The cultural politics of emotion. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press) and social psychologist Margaret Wetherell
(2012: Affect and Emotion: A New Social Science Understanding. London:
Sage) by firmly placing emotions in a social and embodied plane. It pro-
poses that in order to understand language learners’ feelings we need to
understand the circulation of feelings in society, how they are appropriated
and how they affect us. Emotions are not seen as inherent of certain situ-
ations, or as personal projections onto new language learning situations,
but rather they are shaped by the continuous dealings in the sociality of
the additional language. Such a view will be illustrated by providing exam-
ples of how language learners use objects to shape their emotions and to
create new meanings.

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-52853-7_6
96 C. ROS I SOLÉ
Keywords Emotions • Sociality • Feelings • Inner worlds • Embodiment

• Emotion objects • Additional language • Second Language Acquisition
(SLA)
Affect and emotion have for a long time been the key themes of a Cinderella
story in Second Language Acquisition (SLA). Language learners’ reper-
toire of emotions in SLA has since Krashen’s ‘affective filter’ hypothesis
(1985) been unduly neglected, and language learners have mostly been
portrayed as insensitive individuals who go through the business of lan-
guage learning without feeling pain or pleasure. Language learners are not
only seen as insensitive human beings but they are deprived from express-
ing ‘the gamut of human emotions’ (Horan 2013). Language learning
is portrayed as an aseptic subject, a passage to another culture where the
emphasis has not been on the ups and downs experienced during the jour-
ney, but on the destination. Indeed, cognitive-oriented SLA has been con-
structed as an information processing exercise which has largely neglected
the affective dimension of language learning.
This chapter will attempt a reconceptualisation of emotions in language
learning through a socio-cultural lens that challenges the largely psycho-
logical, cognitive and neurobiological approaches that currently domi-
nate accounts of SLA. It will do this by building on the work by critical
language educator Sarah Benesch (2012), cultural theorist Sarah Ahmed
(2004) and linguist Margaret Wetherell (2012). Such understandings of
how emotions work place emotions on a social and embodied plane and
imply an approach to emotions that consider social and perceptual aspects
as central to their definition. A sociocultural approach to emotions high-
lights the importance of society in shaping our feelings and our agency in
shaping and doing ‘emotion work’. It proposes that in order to under-
stand language learners’ feelings we need to understand the circulation
of feelings in society, how they are appropriated and how they affect us.
Emotions are not seen as inherent of certain situations, or as personal
projections onto new language learning situations, but rather, they are
conceptualised as shaped by the continuous dealings in the sociality of the
additional language. Such a view of emotions in SLA will be supported
with data in the second half of this chapter, through the discussion of three
extracts of interviews to language learners where emotions are shaped in
relation with special objects and souvenirs from the target language. But
let me first explain how emotions have been featured in SLA in the last 30
years or so, and why we need a new paradigm to approach them.
THE SOCIAL PROMISE OF EMOTIONS 97
Mainstream SLA has so far provided cognitive and psychologi-

cal accounts to language learning emotions that leave the sociological
and the cultural aspects behind (Ros i Solé and Charalambous 2012;
Charalambous 2013). Whether it is the hindering of language learning
because of feelings of anxiety (Dewaele and Wei 2012; Garrett and Young
2009), choosing different languages for emotional ‘distance’ or ‘close-
ness’ to others (Dewaele and Pavlenko 2002), emotions are seen as lodged
in the learners’ mind and are projected rather than constituted in the lan-
guage learning experience. In other words, the social and the embodied
has been written out of the equation, and language learners’ senses are
dulled and silenced. But recent narrative accounts of identity development
in SLA tell us a different story, where emotions constitute a key element of
the person’s development and identity.
Language Learning as Emotional Possibility

Nobody knew better than Lady Hester Stanhope the potential of language
learning for developing one's emotional life.
Lady Hester Stanhope was a famous English traveler from the nine-
teenth century who bought some camels, escaped the familiarity of her
aristocratic life and went to explore the Middle East. She did not have any
particular objective in mind, no business meeting, no tourist guide book
under her arm. Like other travellers at the time, she had a much bigger
project. She was following a dream: the promise of emotional liberation
and happiness in the Middle East.
Although available accounts of Lady Hester Stanhope travels do not
refer specifically to her dealings with language, they do express her desire
to enter a path of self-transformation. They are reminiscent of SLA
accounts of language learning. These are narratives that talk about the
personal quest for worlds of escapism in linguistic and cultural encounters.
They are stories of language learners that follow their desire of finding
and experiencing new emotions in the intercultural encounter (Pavlenko
2005, 2006; Kramsch 2009; Coffey and Street 2008; Ros i Solé and
Fenoulhet 2010).
Like Lady Hester, language learners’ new experiencing of emotions
involves entering new worlds of possibility for the self, new ways of seeing
themselves, inhabiting alternative worlds and of imagining new horizons.
These alternative worlds make sense not only through the engagement of
the imagination but also physical and social encounters with new cultures.
98 C. ROS I SOLÉ
This chapter argues that language learning is not only about process-
ing linguistic information, of ‘comprehensible input’ (Krashen and Terrell
1983) and language ‘output’ (Swain 1985); it involves the sum of heads
and bodies. It looks at sensual perception and the shaping of emotions
in society. SLA scholars are just beginning to look at how emotions are
performed through language at the boundaries of learners’ bodies and in
interaction with others and the environment (Benesch 2012; Ahmed 2004;
Phipps 2007). This chapter argues that language learners can be conceptu-
alised as active ‘agents’ who engage in ‘emotion work’ (Wetherell 2012).
As has been pointed out (Norton 2000, 2012), language learning
involves agency and personal investment with our environment; and emo-
tions and learners are not only recipients and ‘senders’ of emotions that
come out of their bodies and return untouched, but individuals that join
in the constant ‘emotion work’ that means living in another language.
However, so far, studies on SLA have kept learners’ bodies, their desires
and minds apart and have put language learning to the service of greater
cognitive gains. Below I briefly review this approach to language learning
and its shortcomings.
The Instrumentalisation of Emotions

Traditional SLA’s conceptualisations of emotions have been largely influ-
enced by empirical and rationalistic approaches that are interested in
defining emotions and establishing the type of impact they have on the
language learning process. The emphasis is on how emotions mediate suc-
cess or failure in language learning. This belies an instrumental approach
as it uses emotions as a ‘variable’ for language learning and it implies that
emotions pre-date and are separable from the language learning process.
What is more, it implies that we can measure the effect of emotions on
language learning in terms of their positive or negative impact. In this
view, emotions (or the lack of them) is seen as a variable that affects results
in language learning.
Krashen’s Legacy
Much of the instrumental and cognitive approach to emotions in language
learning owes to Krashen’s affective filter hypothesis (Krashen and Terrell
1983). The affective filter hypothesis believes that high motivation, strong
self-confidence and low anxiety are the three ‘attitudinal factors’ that lead
to successful SLA. Krashen’s theory of affect (ibid.) is interested in justify-

ing how emotions play a role in inhibiting or facilitating language learn-
ing, rather than emotions per se or their effect on the learner, so that the
higher the ‘affective filter’, the less learning occurs. This view on emotions
implies that it is mainly ‘attitudes’ that have an impact on learning rather
than emotions. In very simplistic terms, Krashen’s affective filter hypoth-
esis implied that in order to learn languages we need to put emotions to
one side.
A further step from Krashen, though in a similar vein, is the idea that
emotions can be central and even key to acquiring a language. Such an
approach is found in both neurobiological and cognitive approaches to
emotions. In neurobiological approaches researchers attend to the bio-
logical responses of the individual, which they describe as ‘a collection
of [physical] chemical and neural responses forming a distinctive pattern’
(Damasio 2003: 53; Schumann 1998). In the cognitive school, research-
ers explain emotions as psychological internal states that are positively
or negatively correlated with language learning (Arnold 1999; Pavlenko
2008; Dewaele 2010, 2013). Both approaches, however, describe emo-
tions as static and as internal psychological states where emotions are seen
as processes lodged in the individual’s mind.
Are There Good and Bad Emotions for Language

Learning?
Instrumental approaches to emotions in cognitive accounts (e.g.,
Schumann 1998; Gardner 1985; Dewaele 2010; Pavlenko 2005) link
emotions to success or failure of learning a second language. For example,
if we experience emotions when we learn a language, this will facilitate or
undermine the language learning process (Benesch 2012: 20). There are
specific aspects of emotions that have been linked positively or negatively
with language learning such as students’ motivation to learn the language,
their attitudes towards the language and to what extent they experience
any anxiety when speaking or using the language (Dewaele 2013: 8). This
underlies the belief that emotions can be classified into ‘good’ and ‘bad’.
Positive emotions such as high self-esteem and motivation enhance lan-
guage learning, whereas negative emotions such as anxiety or low self-
esteem inhibit it.
There is some cognitive research that has used emotions as a key
aspect of language learning and the use of multiple languages, a notable
100 C. ROS I SOLÉ
example being Pavlenko (2005) and Dewaele’s (2010) studies of multi-

lingual speakers’ use of emotions that link different languages to different
emotions. These, however, still subscribe to an epistemological approach
to emotions that sees them as being lodged in the mind and pertaining to
the multilingual speakers’ repertoire of cognitive skills.
Multiple Languages, Multiple Emotional Selves

Pavlenko (2005, 2006) elaborates on the traditional cognitive skills belief
that we have one set of universal emotions that get expressed in different
emotional repertoires in different languages. For her, the same emotions
are present in all the languages we speak, and although it is contingent
on the situation we are using them in, they are still firmly located in our
minds. The difference with a purely cognitive approach is that emotions
are realised differently according to the context, and therefore according
to different languages. In an example from an episode of her own life,
Pavlenko (2005) explains how her feelings of grief towards her mother
were the result of her context and the orientation towards the language
she shared with her mother, Russian. Such a contextualisation of emo-
tions does not mean that emotions were shaped in society, but rather that
a particular situation triggered an emotion that she plays out in her head.
Below is an extract where she verbalises an emotion in her head:
She is gone and I am left to “deal with it”. From that point on, my emotions
are no longer purely physical feelings. Now they take shape through the
stories and the angry, bitter words that run through my head: Why did she
postpone seeing a doctor? Why did she refuse the second round of chemo?
Why did she give up? As I question and accuse her, my emotions become
relational …
Such an account shows how individuals do not necessarily reserve the

role of expressing emotions to one of the languages they speak; that is,
the first language (s) (Dewaele 2010). On the contrary, bilingual speak-
ers, multilingual speakers and language learners may choose to express
their emotions in different languages depending on the attachments and
socialisation processes developed in those languages. Indeed, our emo-
tions may not lie in only one language; we are not more emotional in one
language than in another; each language we speak could potentially carry
with it a different set of emotions and embody a different emotional self.

As Pavlenko (2005) points out:
Differences in repertoires internalized in the processes of affective socializa-

tion, combined with cross-linguistic differences in emotion concepts and
scripts, may result in development of distinct affective styles in the respective
languages.
Whereas this approach acknowledges socialisation processes, how these

processes take place is not scrutinized. Instead, the emphasis is on how
different emotions are realised in different languages according to the set-
ting and the actors involved. In speaking different languages, an individual
adopts different affective styles.
The Humanisation of Emotions

In contrast to the instrumental approach to emotions explained above,
approaches rooted in socio-cultural approaches to understandings of emo-
tions have explored new ways of looking at the learners’ experience. Such
an approach inverts the usual direction of the link between language learn-
ing and emotions by focusing on the impact language learning has on the
emotions we experience rather than how emotions impact the process of
language learning. In this view, the focus is on the subjective and inter-
subjective experience.
By looking at emotions as socio-cultural experience we can also see
different benefits for the individual than have so far been claimed; these
involve language learners’ affective worlds. As different scholars have
recently pointed out (Benesch 2012; Kramsch 2006, 2009; McNamara
2013a, Leung and Scarino 2016; Phipps 2007), language learning involves
our emotions as part of the questioning of our identities and personal
development.
In such a personalised view of language learning, emotions are not
viewed as mechanical reactions and appraisals of situations, but as the
embodied experience that allows individuals to experiment with their
views of themselves and of the world. Language learners unlock their
inner worlds through social engagement in the new situations of the sec-
ond language. Learners’ subjectivities involve mind, body and soul. The
learner becomes the ‘nexus’ where imagined and fantastic worlds and past
memories are played out (Kramsch 2006). As Kramsch has elaborated in
102 C. ROS I SOLÉ
her work on the ‘symbolic competence’ of the language learner, ‘subjec-

tivity’ in language learning points at the importance of the inner world
of this language learning, and the role that social engagement in the sec-
ond language plays in unlocking this private world. This constructs the
language learner as an individual with powerful desires and somebody
who does not enter language learning with a blank slate but rather with
a rich baggage of feelings and desires. How this ‘emotional baggage’ is
unpacked and deployed is crucial for understanding how emotions play
out in the language learning process.
Emotions as Discursive Spaces

One way of looking at how emotions are enacted in the social space is
by looking at how language learners discursively construct different emo-
tional selves through the linguistic and cultural practices they participate
in (Wetherell 2012). Language is seen as the place where emotional and
subjective experiences are ‘practised’ and take shape. The new languages
spoken and the social interactions the learners engage in, in the classroom,
in the pub, at work, with new family members, friends or colleagues, begin
to form and transform emotional bonds. How we use and socialise with
the new languages will construct our different emotional selves.
For Kramsch (2006), emotions have a central role in the construction
of identity. By ‘doing’ language, emotions can be moulded into and be
connected to the individual. The spaces and social practices conducted in
the foreign language, in or outside the classroom, in the real or imaginary
space, can provide learners with new emotional scripts. Kramsch (2006)
sees the emotional and subjective aspects of language learning as central
to the language learning experience. The emotional is conceptualised as
a way to connect the individual with language itself. For Kramsch (ibid.),
the power and creativity of language to express and even create differ-
ent emotional states and feelings is heightened with the use of another
language and its symbolic power. Whilst for cognitivists language ‘carries’
emotions and previously written scripts are acted out in different affective
styles, here language is conferred more intention, agency and creativity.
Language is a discursive space that connects the cognitive and the social,
where the subjective and the personal experience of language act as the
glue which unites the social practices with our inner mental life. In this
way, the learner creates a symbolic space where language becomes embod-
ied and somatised. For Kramsch (2006), language is a place of great emo-
tional intensity:
[Speaking another language] is a site of linguistic anxieties and communica-

tive joys.
(Kramsch 2006: 98)
Kinginger (2004a: 1) echoes this by saying that ‘we elect a new emotional
life through a foreign language’.
In this discursive approach, language becomes the embodied space
where creativity and agency merge, an experimental ground, the site where
playful social acts allow the learner to own and embody emotions. Every
little linguistic act evokes and unleashes new emotions, whether they are
the pleasurable sensations of learning Serbian and eating food in ‘authen-
tic’ Serbian surroundings, the feeling of awe felt at the beauty of Arabic
writing or the frustrations of learning the intricacies of Catalan grammar.
Emotions as Intersubjective Phenomena

One of the great dilemmas in the study of emotions is how to marry
the individual and the social. This chapter outlines a view of emotions
that conceptualises the intricate relationship of the individual and the
movement and spatial relations with the individuals and the objects that
surround us, so that emotions are not viewed as exclusively subjective feel-
ings, but as constituted in social interaction and in close contact with our
bodies. Emotions are conceptualised as intersubjective phenomena. To
outline this view, I will be drawing on the work of cultural theorist Sarah
Ahmed (2004), who highlights the importance of society in shaping our
feelings. She believes that in order to understand our feelings we need to
understand the circulation of feelings in society, how we appropriate them
and how they affect us.
Similarly, Wetherell (2012) believes that emotions are inherent of cer-
tain situations and objects, and she constructs emotions as relational to
objects, people and situations, ‘[emotions] are shifting, fluid and move
in interactive patterns, contingent of social relationships and ways of life’
(Wetherell 2012: 13).
Emotions ‘Outside In’

Whereas in traditional cognitive oriented SLA, the experiences of the lan-
guage learner are usually talked about as internal states that the learner
projects onto the situation (e.g., the social anxiety often reported in
104 C. ROS I SOLÉ
language learning that inhibits language learning), I argue that emotions

are constituted in the sociality of language learning, and that this socialis-
ing is not necessarily going to inhibit language learning as conceptualised
in cognitive approaches to SLA. In the ‘sociality’ view of emotions, feel-
ings (e.g., anxiety) are not seen as projections of the learner onto the situ-
ation, but as the result of the different relationships the learner establishes
with people and situations and how these feelings ‘stick’ and influence
future encounters. A particular emotion or feeling, therefore, is something
constituted outside our bodies in relationship with our past experiences
and the apprehension of future ones. Such experiences transform into
relationships with our environment, something we see or don’t see, some-
thing we expect to encounter, something that slides by us or we fear might
be round the corner. For example, listening to a tune in a foreign language
may evoke a similar tune in our own language and the feelings we felt
when we last heard it. Such a network of connections will then provoke
an intense feeling towards the language and that particular social situation
that will stick to our bodies. It will be an experience that affects us, that
does not slide by us and that we will feel attracted to, and will shape the
way we relate to the language (in this case, a pleasant nostalgic feeling).
By portraying emotions as contingent on social practices, we make emo-
tions a key aspect of the experience of language learning; they are the result
of language learning rather than the point of departure. The relationship of
emotions and objects is worth studying as it will give us a clue about how
we relate to new people and objects in a new culture, how we construct
new relationships in this new social milieu and the culture’s rituals.
In this view, emotions do not behave like viruses. We do not catch
them as soon as we are in contact with them: we do not catch a feel-
ing of anxiety or excitement as soon as we enter the language classroom,
for example. Rather, all actions (and emotions) are reactions. Emotions
are ‘emotion objects’ that are shaped by the contact we have with oth-
ers (Ahmed 2004:4).
Emotions are shaped by the imposition of ‘the without’ (the meanings
created outside our bodies and brains) on the individual subject (ibid.,
p. 9).
Emotions appear differently according to the trajectory they are made
to follow. Whereas cognitive approaches would see emotions from the
‘inside out’ (we project our emotions onto the situation), socially rooted
approaches would construct opposite paths, from the ‘outside in’ (the
situation allows us to construct certain emotions). The inside out t rajectory
traces emotional trajectories from the mind, where internal subjective
feelings are lodged to their journey out of the body (i.e., emotions may
leave the body by getting expressed). Although this view also contem-
plates that emotions may return to us, they remain intact and are not
transformed in society. By contrast, in the ‘outside in’ view, we view emo-
tions as social and cultural practices. Emotions are lived out there, in the
language classroom or in the sociality of the new languaculture, and are
appropriated as a result of the lived experience and social interaction.
Let us now look at an example of this embodied ‘outside in’ emotion
in another language learner. This time a learner of Serbian, Weronika, who
explains in great detail her contrasting feelings of sadness and enjoyment
produced by the experiencing of a meal in a Serbian cultural centre:
Yesterday I went to the Serbian Community Centre for dinner. I was sur-
prised to see the centre very much alive. Last time I was there – in June
2008 – the atmosphere was entirely different. An elderly waiter poured our
wine lazily, often peeking at a massive TV in the corner that was transmitting
the trial in the Hague of Vojislav Šešelj one of the alleged war criminals from
Yugoslavia. This time there were three groups having dinner, drinking rakija
and speaking Serbian (or attempting to do so). The waiter caught the buzz,
smiled, spoke Serbian with us and seemed to enjoy the sudden and probably
slightly surprising interest in Serbia and her language. I enjoyed myself very
much as well – speaking Serbian (albeit limited), eating ćevapi, drinking
rakija and smoking Serbian cigarettes.
In a sociality view of emotions, emotions have busy lives. Emotions involve

action and what emotions do. Cultural studies does not describe emotions
but is interested in doing ‘emotion work’:
how emotions circulate between bodies, examining how they stick [to
objects and to people] as well as how they move [between them]
(Ahmed 2004: 4).
Emotions move and get shaped with the interaction and the contact they
have with other objects. Feelings are shaped by objects: they ‘take the
shape of the contact we have with objects’ (Ahmed 2004: 5). Objects are
read in certain ways and prompt certain emotions because we have a cer-
tain orientation towards them. Emotions make an impression on us. These
object-shaped emotions leave a mark on our bodies; they leave a ‘mark on
the surface’, so that next time we ‘read’ the same object we will have a
certain orientation towards it.
106 C. ROS I SOLÉ
Emotion Objects
As Benesch (2012) explains, language learners’ emotions acquire meaning
by entering into a relationship with the objects and the social life sur-
rounding them.
In order to conceptualise emotions objects, I will first show the case
of a Catalan learner (John) and his relationship with maps. In his reflec-
tions about his language learning experiences, he talks about his passion
for walking and how maps are one of his preferred ways of reading and
dwelling in the culture.
Every year we do an expedition somewhere, usually in the UK, but we

are beginning to go abroad. We are doing Mallorca this year and possibly
Corsica next year […] And actually the ‘Consell de Mallorca’ are very good.
They have bought many of the routes we are using, because they want to
promote walking. […] It’s actually very easy. We have been looking at the
routes and it’s about five days. We are trying to stretch it to six and then
have one day in Palma.
(John’s interview, lines 132-143)
In an entry from his diary he makes a reference to a map he has been

trying to translate from a website (‘I have also been trying to translate a
Mallorcan website that provides information about a walk across the tra-
muntana’ (John’s diary, page 16).
The significance of maps for John is one that cannot be overlooked.
This seemingly mundane object tells us about the emotions that John
experiences with it, a set of emotions that at the same time cannot be seen
in isolation from his past and future dreams about his relationship with the
culture. These maps are impregnated with the promise of the sensual plea-
sures of the Mallorcan countryside; they are possibly reminiscent of other
trips and the powerful pleasant memories that those evoke, such as spend-
ing time with his cousins in Perpignan, or his grandfather, the negociant
who lived in the South of France. Maps are also a painful reminder that
he is a stranger in a land that he loves. Although the map acts as a symbol
of things past and hopes for the future, John also feels these sensations in
the here and now.
John’s ambivalent and embodied emotional relationship with maps is
not an unusual one for people who find themselves inhabiting a language
and a culture as strangers in a familiar place. As Phipps (2007) contends,
maps are a way of ‘dwelling’ in another language. Maps do not only aid
movement within a language, but also help moving within that language
and culture. They help learners inhabit another language whilst being able
to move around.
I am interested in what happens when people imagine ‘moving around’,

remember ‘moving around’, and learn how to use spoken language as a way
of finding their way. When learning to speak another language, to move
inside another language, the way in which the world is perceived and related
to changes. The experience of sitting in a café where the language is a closed
curtain of incomprehension, to the gradual movement into dwelling in and
being inhabited by that language changes the relationship to the phenom-
ena of the most everyday of things, such as the ordering of a cup of coffee,
or the finding of one’s way.
(Phipps 2007: 66)
Maps allow John not only to navigate his walk, but also navigate the cul-
ture and learn how to move in it. John is using the map not only as a
physical object that helps him move between the spaces in the culture;
his relationship with the map exemplifies the view that emotions can rest
on an object, outside our minds and at the boundaries of our bodies.
Emotions are not felt in isolation to the lived world, but rather performed
and sensed in contact with other phenomena, for example the map that
shows us the way in another culture. Like Ahmed (2004, 2010), Phipps
believes that we infuse objects with emotion and, in turn, objects help us
making connections between our languages, our emotions and the variety
of social activities we take part in.
Objects as Emotional Possibility

Emotions are constituted by our relationship with other objects. They
are promises, not the finished product. They are potential and possibility,
‘transformative’ and processes of becoming rather than already formed
objects.
Emotions are not only constituted by the extraordinary but also by
ordinary and day-to-day reactions to our surroundings and the objects
around us (food, mobile devices, kitchen utensils, furniture, music, nov-
els, etc.), as well as the fantasies we derive from or project onto them. As
Aronin and Laoire (2012) have pointed out, when examining multilingual
situations we should be paying attention to the realm of physical items
108 C. ROS I SOLÉ
which are produced by humans, events and spaces. These can take many
shapes and forms.
The objects (or artefacts) include everyday life objects such as food and
utensils, furniture and pieces of art, weapons and medical devices, medica-
tions, books and clay tablets of the past, pens and carpenter tools, monu-
ments and buildings.
(Aronin and Laoire 2012: 4)
Objects and material artefacts not only help archaeologists understand the
past by uncovering how other epochs organised themselves, but they help
us see the kind of relationship of belonging and collective view of culture
a group has in the present. Objects tell us about the beliefs, the ways of life
and the rituals of a certain community.
For Jaworski (2010), linguistic landscapes, monuments, artworks,
buildings and other modes of material culture are ways in which tourists
consume the places they visit. Although we could consider that language
learners consume places like the tourist, we need to make a distinction
between the latter and the former, as tourists will probably not continue
the relationship with the object once they have returned to their places of
origin. In contrast to this, language learners will pursue the relationship
and use the material artefact as a bond to the studied culture.
Such objects are meaningful for the analysis of intercultural encounters
because they tell us not only about the values and worlds where these
objects and artefacts were produced but also about the relationship of the
objects with the people using them.
So that the escapism and feelings of happiness we have been talk-
ing about in language learning can be studied not only by investigating
inaccessible processes in individuals’ minds, but also by looking at their
relationship with surrounding objects and how they evoke the values
and rituals of a particular group of people. By establishing a relationship
with a cultural object or souvenir, the language learner lets these sym-
bolic artefacts shape their emotions by evoking certain memories that had
impressed on their bodies.
Below, I will use extracts from a data set of language learners of less
commonly taught languages (Arabic, Catalan and Croatian/Serbian) to
show how different objects (i.e., a souvenir, a novel and exotic food)
become the playing field for emotion work.
Nostalgia in a Moroccan Treasure Box

Emma, a student of Arabic, has built a shrine out of her souvenirs from
several trips to Morocco. She has assembled precious little objects that
she has carefully placed in a little corner in her alcove. She explains that
the objects and sensual experiences that they trigger evoke in her special
pleasurable feelings of nostalgia.
I know. We have lots of Moroccan bowls scattered around the house and I
have a little alcove on the wall which is just the Moroccan section. Things
like a tea pot, and you know the wood they are famous for. […] In the mar-
kets, in the souks they have a thing made of wood. It’s a specific thing made
of wood but […] stuff like that, like little treasure boxes in different shapes
and they smell, they still smell really fresh. It smells of Morocco. Yeah [she
speaks with a lot of feeling] […] it really smells of the wood. Whatever it is
I am not sure, which smells of Morocco. So, yeah, it’s really nice […] Yeah,
ahhh, I look at my wall and it’s ahhh. Oh, it’s good!
(Emma’s interview, lines 153–168)
In the extract above it is clear that Emma does not evoke the feeling of
nostalgia by projecting a feeling that is inside her, but does so in conjunc-
tion with the space and the ‘little world’ she has created in her room.
She relives the emotions towards Arabic and Morocco by getting closer
and 'turning' to the teapots and wooden boxes she cherishes. As Ahmed
(2010) explains, we turn towards the objects we like and we move away
from the objects we don’t like.
To be affected by something is to evaluate that thing. Evaluations are

expressed in how bodies turn towards things … To have our ‘likes’ means
certain objects are gathered around us … Those things we do not like we
move away from.
(Ahmed 2010 in Benesch 2012: 61)
Emma establishes an emotional bond with the culture by using her little
shrine as support and an ‘anchor’ for her feelings towards Morocco and
Arabic. By sensing the objects near her she is drawing from her ‘body
memory’ and ‘impressions’ that different objects made on her in Morocco.
In the extract above, Emma’s building of her feelings is carefully con-
structed in the arranging of her little Moroccan shrine. Like Proust’s mad-
110 C. ROS I SOLÉ
eleines, Emma’s treasure boxes are a powerful evocation of her emotional

bonds and feelings.
It is not only the sight of the scene that provokes in Emma a feeling
of nostalgia, but the ‘primary experience’ of language, as Merleau-Ponty
(1945, 2012) explains. It is the sensing of her special object that unravels
her version of a Moroccan world. And then she relives this by embodying
language, by struggling to find the word to express her feelings. It is not
until she has named the object that she releases her emotion. First through
her senses (‘they smell, really fresh’ ‘it smells of Morocco’) and then by
evaluating the object (‘it’s really nice’). The final stage is to turn to a non-
linguistic world of pure feeling, she lets out a gasp to express her feelings:
‘Yeah … Aah … aaah, oh, it’s good!’.
Liberation, the Romantic Novel

Olga’s ‘emotion work’ is also done by sticking to an object. This time the
special object is a book, and the armchair travelling and escapism that it
represents. This book not only explains her motivation for learning the lan-
guage but it also epitomises the emotions that learning Croatian evokes;
that is, living the fantasy of inhabiting a different world full of adven-
ture that breaks with routine and domesticity. She projects her romantic
cathartic feelings of leaving the ordinary behind and the safe ‘cotton wool
life’. Olga feels attracted by the heroine of a book, an independent and
adventurous woman who escapes her normal surroundings, liberates her-
self and finds love in a fantastic land.
It actually started when my mum gave me a book that was written in the
1930s/40s about this woman travelling through … It’s called Illyrian
Spring, sort of along the coastline. So I had this kind of romantic notion.
And then also Yugoslavia, this socialist history […] It’s this woman, it’s fic-
tion. I think it was written in the 30s or 40s. […] She is kind of this upper
class woman who gets really fed up with her husband so she just walks out
of her family and she is going to Greece and she sets off by train and she
travels all the way through but she gets to Illyria and Dalmatia. And she
never gets any further. And she meets with these amazing characters. She
has this fantastic love affair and all this sort of stuff. So I just had this incred-
ible romantic view. […]
As Ahmed says, ‘all actions are reactions’ (Ahmed 2004: 4). We shape our
feelings by the contact we have with objects and others. In this case, Olga
is shaping her feeling of liberation by reacting and clinging to this book-
object that her mother recommended to her. The feelings of liberation

and romanticism exist first out there, in the book and on the Dalmatian
coast and then are appropriated by Olga to become part of her story of
infatuation with ex-Soviet countries. Her feeling of liberation is shaped
and impressed on her by the account provided in this book . Her feelings
of escapism have been possible thanks to the world of emotional possibil-
ity that this object, the novel Illyrian Spring, has provided..
The Allure of the Exotic

We can all recognise a desire to believe in the ‘exotic’ and mysterious ele-
ments of a foreign culture. We often like things to be different and even
bizarre, despite knowing how much we are simplifying and essentialising
the experience. Eventhough in our multicultural and superdiverse cities
the exotic is hardly ever exotic and one can find ethnic culture for sale at
every corner, with consumables such as food and music from around the
world. Language learners sometimes retain and may even magnify this
allure for the ethnic and the exotic. Sociologist Ulrich Beck (2006) has
put forward the concept of ‘banal cosmopolitanism’, which argues that
cosmopolitan individuals consume mass products such as ethnic food and
world music in an attempt to bring the exotic and the desired world closer
to home and integrate it in their more familiar lives (Ros i Solé 2013). As
Beck (2006: 41) explains:
Banal cosmopolitanism is intimately connected with all forms of consump-

tion. It is exhibited not only by the vast colourful array of meals, foodstuffs,
restaurants and menus routinely found in almost any city anywhere in the
world. It also pervades other spheres of everyday culture—for example music.
In the extract we saw earlier in this chapter, Weronika, even though a

sophisticated intercultural learner, also consumes such a vision of the
‘exotic’ by visiting a Serbian cultural centre and immersing herself in a
quintessential version of the culture. She uses her relationship with 'exotic'
food and dining to explain her relationship with the culture. Weronika not
only builds up a feeling while experiencing and consuming Serbian food
but she also recounts how such an emotion is shaped by her surroundings
and the mood that the event was immersed in. Weronika tells us a story
that contrasts the mood and atmosphere of the place in two different vis-
its. The first time the mood is slow and depressing, the second time upbeat
and sensual.
112 C. ROS I SOLÉ
Both scenes are described in very different terms. The first, when a
war trial of the former Yugoslavia was shown on TV, there was a gloomy
atmosphere and everything moved very slowly (pouring wine lazily) and
with minimal movements (‘peeking’). This is contrasted with a completely
different atmosphere where the focus of the action is not somewhere else
(the war trial transmitted on the TV), but the room is buzzing with activ-
ity: there are more people, and they are all animated, engaged in some
activity: eating (having dinner), drinking, speaking and smoking.
Whereas in the first scene there is no movement of objects, no dyna-
mism, the second time everything is fully animated. If in the first scene,
the adjective ‘slowly’ summarised the mood, in the second, it is the adjec-
tive ‘buzz’ that defines the moment. Weronika does not merely take an
observer and passive position, but she partakes and contributes to the
mood of the place. She is busy doing ‘emotion work’ and joining in the
sociality of emotions. She is busy talking, eating typical food, drinking
spirits and smoking.
Emotions are not static and bound to our bodies; they have busy lives
in which they go to and from bodies and objects. Whereas the sadder
emotion of the first visit to the centre moves slowly across bodies (wine
being poured lazily) and there is hardly any movement at all, the second
scene is replete with activity and full of life. We could say that the feeling
that Weronika experiences, a pleasant feeling of excitement in this Serbian
linguistic setting, is the result of immersing herself in the sociality, the cir-
culation of feelings and the animated atmosphere of the Serbian Cultural
Centre.
Emotions as the Seat of Language Learners’

Sociality
We have seen that the language learning experience cannot be divorced
from the emotional impact it has on the learner, and the constant dealing
with the different emotions provoked by and invested in language learn-
ing becomes part of the learners’ subjectivities and language learning jour-
neys. As Lutz and Abu-Lughod (1990: 6) have pointed out, ‘feelings […]
are currently constituted as the core of the self, the seat of individuality’.
I have argued that feelings are not exclusively a reflection of an internal
state, as much literature on emotions and the link between language learn-
ing and emotions has pointed out (Pavlenko 2002, 2005, 2006; Dewaele
2005), but that they can be viewed as primarily located and negotiated in
social life.
Language learners’ narratives and discourses display emotion as a result

of their social engagement with the target language and culture. Language
learning has been conceptualised as a social practice where emotions are
negotiated and embodied. Indeed, it is through the enactment of lan-
guage practices and the desire for alternative linguistic and cultural land-
scapes and experiences that the learner discursively constructs different
emotional selves.
More cognitive-oriented views of the place of emotions in language
learning see feelings and emotions as located in the mind. Emotions are
seen as ‘universals’ (e.g., Pavlenko 2002, 2005, 2006); that is, a defined
set that is situated in ‘psychobiological processes’ inside the subject’s body
and away from his/her social practices (Lutz and Abu-Lughold 1990:
2). In this view, different languages allow the learner to tap into different
emotions, but these are not bound to the socio-cultural meanings where
they surfaced, and the learner is not seen as experiencing new sensations
with a new language.
In contrast to this, I argue that the linguistic and cultural practices
in which the learner participates can confer on the learner socio-cultural
experiences in which to express a richer set of feelings. In other words,
rather than constructing language learning as a ‘conduit’ for emotions,
we see it as the site where emotional and subjective experiences are acted
out. It is not language, then, but the emotions experienced in language
learning that become the ‘bridge’ between a learner’s inner and social self.
By creating a view of language learning as the emotional nexus between
social and mental life, language learners are seen to connect their feelings
of pride, disgust, exhilaration, empathy, frustration or wonder with their
sense of self in the ordinary dealings and imaginings of language learning.
In our accounts of learners of Arabic, Catalan and Serbian/Croatian we
have found that feelings and emotions can express themselves as intense
moments and experiences of language learning (Lemke 2002). An exam-
ple of this is the intense sense of pleasure and beauty that Antonia has
whilst discovering the meanings behind day-to-day expressions such as
the morning greeting in Arabic ‘morning of roses’, sabah al-ward, or the
sensation of pleasure that Weronika gets through the eating, drinking and
watching the general atmosphere in the Serbian community centre; or
indeed the vivid associations that Mary has with Arabic cultures, when she
tells her story of panic when standing on a sea of cockroaches on the patio
of a building in Cairo.
But the emotions that language learners experience are not only fleet-
ing intense moments disconnected from their life trajectories. Rather, we
114 C. ROS I SOLÉ
have seen how the experiencing of new emotions prompts learners to

rethink and refashion their private lives and personal stories. Language
learners connect their new experiences with their ‘old’ selves. Whilst they
experiment with new feelings and new subjectivities in fictitious or real
journeys in their representations and maps of Catalonia, the complexity
of the ‘Arab world’ and the newly formed Balkan states; they try to make
sense of them with reference to their previous sense of self.
The use of language as a creative space to liberate oneself from or to
make new connections with one’s subjectivity and to forge new routes for
the self through the world of emotion and feelings is patent in the way
language learners connect new experiences with old ones. Some learners
connect their linguistic curiosity or love for unconventional life to their
ancestors and families; for example, Mary connects her love for adventure
to her suffragette ancestor, and John traces his cosmopolitanism to a nego-
ciant of wine in the family. Others, such as Marie and Antonia, will make
the emotional connection through the experience of frustration when they
learnt other languages, compared with a more positive feeling about the
learning of Catalan and Arabic, respectively. For Antonia the experience of
learning German, a language that was chosen for her and brought feelings
of inadequacy and isolation, contrasts with her more recent experience of
Arabic, a language that empowers her.
We have also seen how Mary has brought into her language learning
experience her past contact with the ‘Arabic world’. These memories form
part of who she is as an individual: somebody who cherishes c hildhood
memories of Egypt as well as readings of exotic trips to the East by
nineteenth-century adventurers.
Falling in love and the idea of romance is another trope of the place
of emotion in the language learning experience. As Piller and Takahashi’s
(2006) ethnographic study of the desire of Japanese women who study
English in order to get closer to the West and Western men suggests,
women’s eroticisation and romanticisation of the West is a feature of
English language learning. In my study of Arabic, Catalan and Serbian-
Croatian students in London, Mary’s fascination for the East could be
viewed as the Western equivalent of the Japanese akogare (desire) which
corresponds to the East's representation as a site of romanticisation and
eroticisation in Western travel literature (Blanton 2002; Gilroy 2000). As
Said (1978) has pointed out:
why the Orient still seems to suggest not only fecundity but sexual promise
(and threat) … is not the province of my analysis here, alas, despite of its
frequently noted appearance.
(Said 1978: 188)
The range of feelings that language learners experience in the target lan-
guage is not limited to some past key events and romantic experiences.
As well as experiencing the feelings of escapism and exhilaration, the lan-
guage learner experiences are enmeshed in their more real and down-to-
earth dealings with life. I saw this in the case of Weronika, the Serbian/
Croatian student who developed a feeling of empathy with the speakers of
the language when she witnessed a Croatian woman’s painful memories of
the time of the war in Yugoslavia.
Reconceptualising Emotions in SLA

We have explained that emotions can be seen as the social and embod-
ied experiences we go through when learning a language. Such experi-
ences are not always necessarily useful for learning a new language more
effectively, but they may be a central part of how we develop as language
learners, as multilingual selves and as human beings. In other words, the
experience of emotions in language learning can help us relate better to
other people and get to know ourselves better too. In this sense, language
learning and the emotions felt whilst learning the language are not seen as
a stepping stone to achieving a particular task, but rather as an important
place in which to reflect about the self and the possibilities that lie ahead
of us for our personal growth. Or as Benesch (2012) has put it ‘to live
more satisfying lives and to be responsible members of society’ (p. 21), or
as Leung and Scarino (2016) put it, to fulfil a new purpose in language
learning, that of personal development.
In this chapter, emotions are seen as a way to enrich our human expe-
riences: our relationships in another language and our understanding of
the world around us. Emotions in language learning can lead to worlds
of possibility for the self; they can open new windows to how we see and
experience our surroundings. The promise of emotions is the window of
opportunities for becoming something else, and the personal transforma-
tion that language learning offers.
116 C. ROS I SOLÉ
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CHAPTER 7
Life in a Caravan
Abstract This chapter describes language learners’ experiences of Second

Language Acquisition and their cultural encounters invoking the notion
of travel and nomadism. From the traditional search for utopian worlds
and epiphanies of the life-long language learner, to the instrumen-
tal agendas of the package holiday tourist, the business traveller or the
immigrant language learner. This chapter reframes the idea of ‘travelling’
through cultures as a completely different journey, one which will turn
out to be a fertile trope for looking at language learners’ personal motives.
Sometimes the language learner is compared to the romantic traveller who
gains access to imaginary spaces of personal liberation; in other cases to a
moral crusade or the development of new sensibilities. Above all, it argues
that the language learning ‘passage’ can take a myriad of forms and shapes,
from the ‘quick tourist encounter’, to the seeker of extreme experiences in
the mysterious and the bizarre, to the long and arduous life journey. But
the travelling I discuss here goes beyond the shortening of geographical
distances to signal the complex web of personal stories and desires that are
inscribed into particular language learners’ experiences and the idiosyn-
cratic journeys into the self that can be identified.
Keywords Travel • Sensibilities • Journeys • Liberation • Transformation

• Self-revelation • Utopia • Second Language Acquisition (SLA)
• Language learner • Nomadism

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-52853-7_7
120 C. ROS I SOLÉ
Much language learning pedagogy is predicated on the fact that language

learners are settled in a particular linguistic and cultural home, their
‘native’ language(s) and cultures, and a fixed destination, that of the ‘ideal
native speaker’. There is often an assumption that language learning is a
metaphoric journey in one single direction, from one culture to another,
from one history and one set of values to another, from the ‘host’ to a
‘target’ culture. In this chapter I will argue for a view of language learn-
ers’ trajectories away from linear paths. Instead I will present a view of
language learners’ journeys as itineraries where learners stop and have a
break, go backwards and forwards, and take alternative and unexpected
paths. I will argue that language learners travel ‘through’ cultures rather
than ‘in between’ cultures. They travel both on designated routes, in
rough terrains, off the beaten track, but also on intimate and spiritual
journeys in their memories and imagination. Language learners may not
follow a straight route or path, but may get caught in circular paths and
loops, travelling in unexpected directions and forming complex networks.
Much has also been written about the motivations and purposes of
the language learner journey (Dornyei 2001; Leung and Scarino 2016;
Norton 2000; Kramsch 2009). Whereas the departures and destina-
tions of these journeys have repeatedly been problematised in the Second
Language Acquisition and language learning literature (e.g., Kramsch
1998; Kramsch and Von Hoene 2001; Rampton 1990; Risager 2007;
Starkey 2010; Ros i Solé 2013), what has not been discussed is the nature
of this journey and the nomadic cartographies drawn along the way. The
extract below is taken from the novel Leo the African by Amin Maalouf,
about one such travellers of cultures, based on a real character. It relates
the story of Leon (real name Hassan-al-Wazzan), a man born in Granada
who had to flee to the Maghreb once Granada was conquered by the
Christian kings of sixteenth-century Spain. There he became an ambas-
sador, and while undertaking a pilgrimage to Mecca he was captured by
Sicilian pirates and finally he was adopted by Pope Leo X. He then con-
verted to Catholicism, became known as Jean-Léon de Medicis, and wrote
a successful and comprehensive book about Africa called Description of
Africa.
I, Hasan the son of Muhammad the weigh-master, I, Jean-Leon de Medici,

circumcised at the hand of a barber and baptized at the hand of a pope, I
am now called the African, but I am not from Africa, nor from Europe, nor
from Arabia. I am also called the Granadan, the Fassi, the Zayyati, but I
LIFE IN A CARAVAN 121
come from no country, from no city, no tribe. I am the son of the road, my
country is the caravan, my life the most unexpected of voyages.
(Maalouf 1988: 1)
The nomadic life of ‘Leo the African’ may sound like a poetic and roman-
tic quimera that regards the nomadic life as a utopia. But if we think of
the language learners we have seen in this book, and indeed if we think of
the mobility of today’s population (both out of choice or necessity), we
will concede that the notion of a cultural nomadic existence, literal and
figured, is not alien to the language learner or indeed the twenty-first-
century citizen.
In this section I will discuss language learners’ experiences invoking the
notion of ‘travel’. The use of a travel metaphor for describing the experi-
ence of language learning is not new (e.g., Cronin 2000; Kramsch and Von
Hoene 2001; Phipps 2007). Indeed, language learning has often been con-
veyed as imaginings of distant places that evoke thoughts of happiness and
exotic cultures, pilgrimages in search of truth, and mythical places. With
the democratisation of travel (Urry 1990), the representation of the experi-
ence of travel for the language learner has undergone a dramatic change.
From the traditional search for utopian worlds and epiphanies of the life-
long language learner, language learning has been transformed into today’s
functional and instrumental agenda of the package holiday tourist: ‘buy the
ticket, order the meal, book the hotel’ (Cronin 2000: 19).
However, despite the range of goals of the language learner, the per-
sonal and even emotional experience of the language learner has often
been neglected. The possibility that the language learning experience can
infuse the learner with new moral meanings and aesthetic sensibilities, like
the romantic traveller who gains access to imaginary spaces of personal
liberation (Gilroy 2000), is an idea that is a fertile trope for language
learners’ personal journeys and is under-researched. These personal forays
can take a myriad of forms and shapes, from the life-long ‘language learn-
ing project’ (Coffey and Street 2008) to the ‘quick tourist encounter’
(Phipps 2007), or the migrant language learner personal journey, which
does not search for solutions to social problems but new interpretations
(Phipps and Kay 2014). The travelling metaphor I am interested in here
goes beyond the shortening of geographical distances to signal practices
and experiences, the adapting to new intercultural situations in the lan-
guage learning journey.
122 C. ROS I SOLÉ
At this point, it will be useful to bring into our discussion the dif-
ferent types of travellers that have been identified in the cultural studies
literature. One of the most enlightening accounts is the one put forward
by Bauman (1996), which is based on the socio-historical juncture the
traveller lives in. He makes the distinction between travellers in the mod-
ern era who concentrated on single and well-defined trajectories, whom
he views as cast in the mould of pilgrims, and the wanderer, vagabond
or tourist of the postmodern age with their ‘horror of being bound and
fixed’ (Bauman 1996: 26). Others, like Urry (1990) highlight the degree
of engagement between travellers and the society they immerse them-
selves in. Urry (1990) distinguishes a particular traveller stance, ‘the tour-
ist gaze’, which is the superficial and aesthetic gaze of the tourist who
does not commit himself to the social and political realities of the visited
land. Taking the ‘tourist gaze’ as the point of departure for a type of
traveller whose interests in the target culture are superficial, I will talk
about the existence of the opposite type of traveller: one who seeks deep
engagement with new realities in a non-linear way, and comes in different
travellers’ guises. In the following section I show the types of metaphoric
travelling that language learners may embark on.
In the language portraits we have seen, language learners trace their
personal routes and learning lifestyles by designing their own journeys
through language and culture. I will discuss this by using four travel meta-
phors to illustrate the forms that language learners’ quests for new inter-
subjectivities and personal trajectories may take. These are not intended to
be all the possible trajectories of the language-traveller, but rather to point
out the possibilities for personal development that a itinerant language
learning offers. Language learning, then, is seen as a nomadic enterprise,
a sort of Appaduraian Mediascape (Appadurai 1996), which forms lan-
guage learners' patchwork of resources, skills and competences developed
throughout their life trajectories (Blommaert and Backus 2013). The
language learner experience is seen as different images and ‘memories’
of the world. These can be ‘image-centered’ accounts of ‘strips of real-
ity’ (Appadurai 1996) that equip the language learner with plots, char-
acters and textual forms that allow them to build their own scripts of the
imagined target culture. While on the move, language learners collect and
organise their experiences and ‘body memories’ that feed their language
learning stories with their own characters and their versions of belonging.
Whether these new world assemblages are canvases readily available in the
sociality of their interactions or whether they are alive in language learners’
imagination, the possibilities for these personally constructed multilingual

canvases are infinite.
In this chapter, I will offer some possible plots and characters that
help us imagine these language learning Mediascapes: the character of the
flâneur, already introduced in Chap. 3, embodies a particular aesthetic
stance and ways of moving and travelling in the culture—the language
learners’ desire to experience ‘leisureness’ and aesthetic contemplation;
the tourist, pursuing adventure through exhilarating and extraordinary
experiences; the pilgrim, whose goal is fixed on a destination rather than
the detours on the way; and the cosmopolitan, the language learner who
seeks a sense of social compromise and ‘worldliness’.
The Flâneur
If the traditional language learner has often been portrayed as a purpose-
ful individual, with specific needs and goals in mind (e.g., learning the
language for communicating effectively in business situations), the experi-
ence of the flâneur language learner is one that is leisured and aimless. The
flâneur is rather detached from society.
One could describe it as ‘sightseeing with the sound switched off’
(Cronin 2000). Unlike the image of the phrase-book globetrotter who
establishes direct contact with the host culture and interacts with it, the
flâneur is happy to be silent, to adopt a distant gaze and to ‘take in’ the
surroundings, to observe scrupulously, noticing the way things are said
and expressed in the culture, not only through words but also through
other artistic expression. The flâneur strolls and wanders around without
aim. There is no particular destination, no road-map or pre-determined
itinerary. The flâneur wants to be open and unprejudiced; ‘he wants to re-
open the options that have been closed’ (Bauman 1996: 139).
We have seen in previous chapters that several language learners have
this experience of wandering in the city and reading its meanings through
aesthetic appreciation. Marie repeatedly visits her favourite building in
Barcelona, the Sagrada Familia, and marvels at its uniqueness. Weronika
prefers the monumental style of Eastern-bloc hotels in the former
Yugoslavia. Mary is filled with awe when she sees the Arabic writing of
the mosques, and Antonia craves more visual memories of the path of his-
tory, for example the Roman monuments she saw in Jordan. These read-
ings of linguistic and cultural meanings through careful observation of
the surroundings by the language learner-turned-flâneur go beyond the
124 C. ROS I SOLÉ
purely aesthetic to venture into a political and historically aware observer.

Language learners also study the visual marks of history, such as the legacy
that a painful war has left on its city buildings and bullet ridden walls as
the following field notes from my Serbian-Croatian case study illustrate:
One of the students told the anecdote that she once was sitting in a café
having a drink and just opposite there was this building completely bat-
tered in the war. She felt awkward. Another student said how sad it was to
still have all these places in Serbia where the place was completely ‘level’.
Although it was more than seventeen years ago nothing had been done
about it.
Field notes, Meeting with students in Bloomsbury (3/12/08)
These accounts by students of Serbian and Croatian of the visual remind-

ers of the destructive nature of war in the buildings of the cities in the
former Yugoslavia show the power that students’ lived experiences have on
their own interpretation of linguistic and cultural worlds.
Imagining the language learner as a flâneur grants him/her a new free-
dom of movement from the physical travelling -by joining local commu-
nity centres and socialising with friends or visiting a foreign country, to the
more abstract and intellectual pursuit of the exploration of cultural memo-
ries through incursions into the literature, the arts or history. Whereas the
students in our study are not able to stroll and wander the streets of Cairo,
Barcelona or Belgrade as often as they might like to, they are able to graze
and ‘botanise’ the culture on a different scale.1 But in our study, there is
also a new type of flânerie, one that discovers a global and diasporic com-
munity. For example, Weronika, our student of Croatian, identifies signs
of Yugoslavia diasporic life in Berlin. Below I reproduce an extract where
she tells us how she identified ‘post-Yugoslav’ culture behind the shop
fronts and windows in one of the neighbourhoods in Berlin.
I am in Berlin now, which hosts a large ‘post-Yugoslav’ population. Even

in Neuköln, which after Kreutzberg is home to the largest Turkish dias-
pora. I can see a shop named Balkanische spezialitäten—Balkan specialities.
What are the Balkan specialities? I can’t know for sure because the shop is
closed now, but I’m sure one could find there ajvar (a paste made of smoked
and grounded peppers), sarma (stuffed vine leaves), pršut (like Italian pro-
sciutto), kajmak cheese and other delicious things.
(Weronika’s diary, page 16)
Similarly, with the internet, the language learner roams a global border-
less geography while identifying signs of other cultures in a flâneur-like
fashion. Marie, a learner of Catalan, can be said to use the stance of the
flâneur as a way of observing and moving through the culture. Marie is
constantly surfing the internet to download Catalan programs that feed
her curiosity in a whimsical and ‘unproductive’ fashion. Similarly, John,
another student of Catalan, is able to do his detective work from a dis-
tance by ‘collecting the knowledge, even if superficial, of the surrounding
parameters’ (Morawski 1994: 183) for his Mallorcan walks and moving
around the culture by using maps of the countryside.
Whereas the language learner may buy into the images and lifestyles
portrayed by particular ideologies, such as the one provided by the Catalan
cultural policies about Barcelona, the way learners live out these discourses
is inflected by their own particular interests and desires. Like the Romantic
image of the ‘mirror and the lamp’, the flâneur language learners interpret
their surroundings through an aesthetic subjectivity. Like Baudelaire’s
characters at the turn of the century, an intellectual elite who sought aes-
thetic and intellectual stimulation in urban and exotic landscapes, the flâ-
neur language learner of the twenty-first century surveys and dissects the
surroundings of another culture in a leisurely fashion. When they roam
the ‘foreign’ city and its cultures, the flâneur language learners are not
taking a superior attitude; they are adopting a new stance, one that leaves
the pragmatic and the instrumental approach to languages to one side to
privilege the aesthetic and, as Merleau-Ponty (1945, 2012) said, to give
primacy to personal experience. Let's now turn to our next character in
language learners' mediascapes and fictions: the tourist.
The Tourist
The tourist we are referring to here is not the notion put forward by
instrumentalist and some forms of Communicative Language Teaching
approaches, a superficial traveller who follows an already traced route;
nor does it mean the notion of a tourist language learner who is rooted
in ideas of nationhood and passive consumption of the target culture, a
notion that avoids personal engagement, reflection and questioning of
cultural values discussed elsewhere in the literature (e.g., Urry 1990; Mar-
Molinero 1992; Parry 2000; Ros i Solé 2003; Gray 2007; Fenoulhet and
Ros i Solé 2010).
126 C. ROS I SOLÉ
This is a tourist who is looking to escape from the conventions and

familiarity of everyday life. Language is above all ‘escape’: ‘the urge to
escape from a state of tedious conformity with one’s present environ-
ment to a state of plenitude and enhanced power’ (Kramsch 2009: 14).
One could say that the tourist takes a Romantic and exoticised attitude
to the culture. If the flâneur is the epitome of a leisurely approach to the
aesthetics of the host culture and a relaxed lifestyle, the adventurer, the
‘tourist’, as Bauman calls him/her (1996: 29), stands for the ‘constant
and systematic seeker of experience, of the experience of difference and
novelty’. For Bauman (1996), tourists just prefer to take a dip, in and out
of the culture, so that it is a reversible change; or, as Bauman (1996: 29)
also says, ‘it will not stick to the skin and thus can be shaken off whenever
they wish’.
But whereas for Bauman tourists do not want to change themselves
permanently, language learners often take a touristic and romanticised
stance, whilst at the same time entering processes of self-revelation and
becoming.
Mary, a student of Arabic, epitomises this type of Romantic travel in
language learning, an adventurous and exhilarating experience. Talking of
Lady Hester Stanhope, the eighteenth-century English adventurer, Mary
shares with me her passion for 19th century female travellers:
200 years ago. She just took her maid and went off and bought some camels
and went exploring. I’m really interested in women who have done this.
And I have a lot of literature and travel writing about people’s adventures in
the Middle East and I find it … I want to go and do that. That sounds like
fun. I know it would be a very different experience even, to a few years ago
(Mary’s interview, lines 382–387)
Mary finds Arabic a romantic adventure that will make her experience
something nearing the sublime and out of the ordinary. Mary has an exu-
berant personality and is constantly seeking new challenges and thrills,
whether it is a competition to sail across the English Channel or walking
around in a war-torn country where she escaped the dangers of landmines.
When Mary thinks and dreams about travelling to the Middle East, she
not only has an idea of what she is going to find there (she would have
read it in her books) but she also has an image of the type of person she
will be. She does not envisage herself as following an already traced route
or ‘beaten track’, but she expects a more adventurous path. She fits in with
Bauman’s description of a ‘tourist traveller’ (1996):
As the joys of the familiar wear off and cease to allure, the tourists want to
immerse themselves in a strange and bizarre element (a pleasant feeling, a
tickling an rejuvenating feeling, like letting oneself be buffeted by sea waves)
on condition, though that it will not stick to the skin and thus can be shaken
off whenever they wish.
(Bauman 1996: 29)
Mary’s touristic disposition towards the Arabic language then, is not

a pre-packaged culture given by some textbooks or the familiar writings
of essentialised cultures on the media. It is not an emulation of a life-
style either, but a specific and personally chosen viewpoint, a subjective
if romanticised gaze.
Mary not only travels into the culture with new projects and imaginings
but she also accesses her personal history. Mary is proud to be related to
one of the famous English suffragettes who fought for women’s right to
vote, and such a connection with a strong and empowered woman gives
her courage and strength to pursue her own dream. Her close connections
to British politics are further emphasised by another family connection,
her father, an expatriate engineer who constantly travelled and lived in the
Middle East region. This relationship with her past in the Middle East is
one embedded in nostalgia, memories, images and sensual experiences she
lived while travelling with her family.
Mary comes across as somebody who is driven by a complex set of dis-
positions which are entangled both in her personal history of experiences
of visiting Egypt and other Middle Eastern countries, so that her personal
itinerary draws both on historical, imagined and romanticised versions of
the Middle East. Mary’s ‘tourist’ stance towards the target culture is one
that is characterised by Romantic expectations of the culture and personal
memories and nostalgia for a time past, one that is not indelible, but rather
a linguistic and cultural experience that will transform her.
The Pilgrim
Like Mary’s vision of the Middle East or John’s reveries about Mallorca’s
simple life, the study of a foreign language may appear to the language
learner as some potent truth, or the vision of a perfect society on a utopian
island. The trip to another culture can take mythical proportions. The fan-
tastical meanings and magical powers of the target language and culture
may be derived from the potential to unlock another world (Ros i Solé and
Fenouhlet 2010), whether this is the utopia of a life in the countryside or
128 C. ROS I SOLÉ
the exoticism of a faraway country. The power of the imagination and the
fantastic with regard to the conception and tracing of new linguistic selves
in language learning has already been pointed out in the literature (Kanno
and Norton 2003; Kramsch 2006), but deserves further exploration.
The pilgrim-learner dwells in a type of desert, a state of mind which iso-
lates him/her from the distractions and expectations of family and friends.
He/she creates an island, formed by a tightly knit community of language
learners, their personal investment in the learning project and their sense
of purpose. In the fieldnotes I reproduce here, I explain how Antonia and
myself, both students of Arabic, create such a utopian island in which to
live out our self-made Arabic world in London.
Today I met up with Antonia in town to go for something to eat and to col-
lect her diary. We arranged to meet in a ‘Middle Eastern’ café in Bloomsbury.
I had never been there, but I thought it would be fun meeting in a place
with some kind of link with Arabic. The place turned out to be Lebanese
and it filled quite well our expectations, with middle Eastern decorations
and related pictures on the walls […] The café closed very quickly […] it
wasn’t a planned thing that we headed to another Middle Eastern venue, a
Turkish restaurant, which seemed natural at the time […] so we ended up
doing a mini-tour of the Ottoman Empire in Bloomsbury. Maybe we could
find more connections if we digged deeper. Some famous Sultan who stayed
in Bloomsbury, who knows?
(Fieldnotes, Arabic, 13/12/08)
Even though the pilgrim has a very specific destination, it is the journey
that gives it meaning. The language learner, like the pilgrim, can also be
on a path of self-betterment to reach some inner truth, peace and iden-
tity. For language learners, speaking the language may require strength of
character and entering a process of self-cultivation. It requires a certain
amount of ‘courage’ (Weronika’s diary, page 20), ‘pain’ and ‘determina-
tion’ (Antonia’s diary, pp. 8, 17, 18). As Antonia says in her diary, she
always strives to do better, she is on a path of self-betterment.
At the end of this term I feel I have made small progress in learning the
language. I hope by the time I finish the next term it will be even better. I
don’t know, we’ll see.
(Antonia’s diary, pp. 19–20)
The metaphors Antonia uses to describe how difficult she finds learning
Arabic show her perseverance and her constant battling against the odds;
for example, she finds it ‘too much’ and feels that she is ‘fumbling her
way’ and wishes she ‘could see the way out of this maze’ (diary, p. 17).
Although Antonia finds Arabic ‘tough’ (‘numerals are tough as hell’, diary,
p. 15) and confusing, she perseveres, and overcoming the difficulties gives
her pleasure by making her feel a better person.
But, as Bauman (1996) points out, the pilgrim’s truth and destina-
tion are always elsewhere, a place where the language learner dreams of
being, in this case to master the language. When Weronika talks about the
humbling feelings of having to go back to skills one learns in childhood,
such as learning to write, and what a long and arduous journey it is for the
adult language learner to start anew, she is signalling that many language
learners are choosing to view their experience of language learning not as
a ‘quick encounter’, a sweet reverie or the ultimate escapism, but a ‘long
slog’.
I was forced today to search through the internet for the handwritten ver-
sion of Cyrillic alphabet. I could only write the so-called print version of all
the letters, and it made me feel like a 6 year old learning how to write. So
in order to feel like a grown-up again, I spent three hours practising writing
smoothly in Cyrillic. It doesn’t look great (still/yet), but I’m getting there.
Weronika’s diary, p. 14
Learning a language is thus construed as a journey of self-improvement

and one of delayed gratification, like the quest for identity of the pilgrim:
It is the difference in amount between the pleasure of satisfaction which is

demanded and that which is actually achieved that provides the driving fac-
tor which will permit of no halting at any position attained.
(Bauman 1996: 22)
The Cosmopolitan
In the language portrait of Weronika, the student of Croatian, I argued
that language learners can construct cosmopolitan identities for them-
selves, that is to say, postnational identities that neither refuse nor fully
embrace nationalism or globalisation. This understanding of ‘cosmo-
politanism’ distances itself from economic or politically based definitions.
Instead it is rooted in the dynamic self, the discourses and imaginaries
circulating in new cultural models, and their power to incite the self to
be in constant evolution and transformation. The cosmopolitanism I will
130 C. ROS I SOLÉ
be talking about, then, is one that is based on the individual’s everyday

world, the interactions with the social world around him/her, and the
fluidity of national and cultural alliances that he/she is able to form. For
this type of cosmopolitan, there are no clear boundaries between the self
and the other.
For cosmopolitans, the lived culture of everyday life becomes central
(Delanty 2005). This form of cosmopolitanism discards the administrative
demands and official cultural policies that other ‘cosmopolitanisms’ pro-
mote. As we saw in our case study chapters, a good example of this type of
ordinary cosmopolitan thinking is found in language learners’ narratives,
in the way they construct meaning with ordinary events and ‘banal cos-
mopolitanism’ in their lives (Beck 2006), and in the way they investigate
and internalise the cultures and languages they are studying. As we have
seen in learners’ extracts, as well as having dreams about distant lands and
exotic landscapes, these learners also live the Arab, Catalan and Serbian
culture on their doorstep and embody them in different ways. Learners
engage with language in a variety of locations in their ordinary and mun-
dane activities: they go to a Serbian community centre to have a meal, they
study Catalan vocabulary lists while travelling on the train to work, they
read the Arabic signs on London’s well-known ‘Middle Eastern’ thor-
oughfare, Edgware Road, with its multitude of Middle Eastern restaurants
and shops, or they buy biscuits with Arabic writing on them to practise
the language.
The two opposing forces of national attachments and transnational
affiliations are not in contradiction for the truly cosmopolitan individ-
ual. According to Delanty (2005), ‘cosmopolitanism does not entail the
renunciation of local or national attachments’ (p. 416). Despite the inter-
national and mobile outlook of cosmopolitans, they also feel they belong
to a national community. In my data, I could observe that whilst being
rooted in national demarcations, learners embraced transnational affilia-
tions, for example, in their interest in the etymology of words and how
cultures borrowed and lent their language to each other.
In our Serbian case study we have seen that Weronika displays a highly
complex set of alliances to different countries. On the one hand, she rec-
ognises her international upbringing and education (Holland, Poland,
Britain); on the other, she is interested in researching a particular national
‘identity’, that of Croatia. Her transnationalism is made manifest in how
she perceives her identity: one that is multiple and dynamic, which fluctu-
ates from one country to another2:
‘Cristina—How do you identify yourself in all these countries?

Weronika—Oh, that’s a difficult question, since I usually try to deconstruct
such concepts such as Eastern Europe, Central Europe, Western Europe. I
think it’s best to see yourself as fluctuating. Certain aspects of me are very
Westernised since I have been living here for such a long time, in Western
Europe, so I think that certain aspects such as individualism are completely
western, whereas others, well the post-socialist experience and what it means
to live in a socialist country, to be able to understand how people feel there
and what do they expect from life. To understand the attachment to reli-
gion and family is very Central European and I think I can understand that
because of my heritage. So I always feel myself as balancing on this line and
maybe playing a little bit with those images and taking whatever I see as
suitable for myself from either.
(Weronika’s interview, lines 148–163)
We also saw that, like Weronika, Antonia feels that her roots are not only
in Romania, as this is a country that has been influenced by many others.
She explains this to me when we go to a Turkish restaurant and she finds
it exciting that she can recognise some of the words, which she puts down
to the (Arab) linguistic legacy of the Ottoman Empire in Romania and
Turkey.
Antonia is therefore creating her own figured world and symbolic
reality by challenging the ‘national’ mapping of languages and cultures.
Antonia gathers evidence from history and language to create her own
version of the ‘Arab world’. Through imagination and curiosity she modi-
fies prevalent ideas about Romanian culture in the world and redefines
it to construct her own cartography of the world with Romania in the
middle, ‘wedged’ between the East and the West.
The cosmopolitan language learner does not differentiate between
him/herself and the ‘other’. The abyss and the difference between cul-
tures that nation-based representations of cultures assume is erased. Here,
there is no clear division between the self and the other, and rather than an
‘encounter’ of two cultures there is a gradual building of curiosity and affin-
ity with another culture through personal interests. What is more, learn-
ing a language becomes ‘the act’ of learning a language, which becomes
practices of self-transformation, the juncture in these people’s lives where
the ‘practices of the self’ (Holland et al. 2001) are being revised. In the
acting out of different activities, the boundaries between languages and
cultures become flexible and negotiable. This is accomplished through the
constant interaction between the spaces of the cultural and public, and the
132 C. ROS I SOLÉ
spheres of the intimate. And the individual does not see him/herself as
fixed to a particular language and culture, but fluctuates from one set of
cultural meanings to another. The language learner inhabits and performs
social and even ‘personal acts’ within the target culture. He/she does not
see a barrier between him/herself and what is possible in the other culture.
Instead, he/she discovers and immerses him/herself in this new exciting
world through its food, its landscapes and etymological language puzzles.
My data set is riddled with examples of language learners ‘moving’
through cultures: not only crossing the boundaries between the ‘target
culture’ and their cultures, but becoming adept at performing new lin-
guistic and cultural routines in the intimate spaces of their lives. We saw
how Weronika was inspired to cook a Balkan recipe with the vegetables
delivered to her flat in London. She is equally at home and at ease savour-
ing the Turkish flavours in a neighbourhood in Berlin as experiencing the
vibrant ‘Serbian cultural island’ in London’s Serbian Cultural Centre.
Another student, John, combines his passion for walking with his per-
sonal desire to learn Catalan. So, rather than relying on a guidebook that
would take him to already trodden paths and would give him a generic
and essentialised ‘tourist gaze’, John actively engages and invests himself
in finding his own way through the Catalan countryside.
Antonia’s narrated encounter of the Iraqi speaker in the Halls of
Residence also shows a personal and intimate investment into the task
of language learning and a desire to go beyond the pragmatics of com-
munication. In fact, she displays a clear indifference for the actual social
encounter. She sees in the Arab speaker an informant, a springboard to
her real objective which is to find out more about the language and the
construction of her personal Arab world.
We have seen how the four language learners’ lifestyles connect their
intellectual aspirations with their most private desires. The attraction for
the exotic and the different, but also the pursuit of moral and personal
challenges, are what make these learners desire to experience the language
so strong.
By using the metaphor of ‘life in a caravan’, the language learner is
imagined as somebody who experiences the aestheticism and beauty of a
new culture, but also engages with the romanticism and the excitement
of something unfamiliar. By adopting the pilgrims’ spirituality and the
social and political engagement of the cosmopolitan, the language learner
does not only absorb the culture unquestioningly, but dissects it, dwells
on it and subverts it with his/her own experience. By travelling ‘through’
cultures, learners pitch their histories, their stories and their lives to a new
audience. Language learners are in constant motion, which allows for
pauses and reflections, mistakes, reformulations, and improvisations that
feed on the contingent. Taking a traveller’s guise, whether flâneur, tourist,
pilgrim or cosmopolitan, such ‘becomings’ offer new concepts and vocab-
ularies to engage language learners in the ‘moving’ between cultures and
the personal interpretations and transformations of new cultural worlds.
Notes
1. Here I refer to the ‘Botanising on the asphalt’ phrase coined by
Walter Benjamin to talk about the lifestyle of the flâneur.
2. This extract has also been used in Chap. 5.
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CHAPTER 8
Conclusion: The Arts of Language Learning
Abstract This book has proposed an understanding of the learners’

linguistic and cultural experience that challenges current paradigms in
Second Language Acquisition. I have argued for the acknowledgement
of a personal and nomadic world for the language learner which does not
feed on exclusively subjective worlds, an imagined and symbolic sphere
isolated and non-transferable to others, but on worlds that are built on
the intersubjectivity of the social flow of human relations. In this under-
standing of the language learner’s world, the learner is no longer tied to a
particular place on the map, a specific territory and named culture; instead
he/she lays claim to a variety of cultures and different cultural forma-
tions, whether they are national, spiritual or artistic. Learners’ journeys
of self-cultivation have been presented as real and imagined ‘movement’
and ‘travel’ through cultures and across learners’ history and desires for
the future, whilst being non-transferable and invisible skills for those who
do not experience them. Finally, this conclusion provides a manifesto that
pledges a new way of looking and approaching language learning that pro-
vides an added dimension to the experience of learning a new language,
whilst proposing a new identity for language learning. I set out an agenda
that calls for the transformation of so called ‘language competences’ for
‘language arts’ which signals a shift of emphasis from the rational and
transcendental to the aesthetic and personal.

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-52853-7_8
138 C. ROS I SOLÉ
Keywords Un-transferable skills • Acts of language learning • Manifesto

• Aesthetic • Language arts • Invisible skills • Language travel
This book has argued that language educators and researchers need to
break free from the constraints of the instrumental and functional approach
to language learning and the empiricist approach espoused by mainstream
Second Language Acquisition (SLA) theory. In order for language learners
to be empowered as fully fledged human beings and to benefit from the
challenges of today’s multilingual and superdiverse world, language learn-
ing needs to be approached in a radical new way. Drawing on Romanticism,
Aestheticism, Phenomenology and Nomadic philosophy I have constructed
a new paradigm for language learning that emphasises the personally mean-
ingful in language learning. This new approach not only aims to erase cul-
tural and linguistic barriers, but also to construct a new goal for language
learning, one that repurposes language learning for personal development.
If Communicative Language Teaching and its pragmatic objectives ori-
ented the language learner towards acquiring specific linguistic goals and
competences, this book has argued that a nomadic orientation to lan-
guage pedagogy provides a multitude of paths and routes for the language
learner to follow. It looks at language learning not as a way to acquire a
fixed set of transferable skills to apply to a particular cultural situation,
but to develop a personal collection of memories, imaginings and emo-
tions that weave in learners’ intersubjectivities, histories and dispositions
to form a personally assembled multilingual world.
The nomadic and personal journey of the language learner, however,
will not be possible if languages remain to be understood and taught under
the current pedagogical regime. So far, languages are not only presented
to the language learner as a competitive advantage in a neoliberal society
which values wealth and success, but as the vehicles of closed, generic and
ideologically driven views of cultures that the learner is urged to consume
unquestioningly. Thus, language learners are not encouraged to subvert
the modernist ready-made versions of one language/one culture, rather
they are there to ‘learn’ a sacrosanct and a fetishised version of the culture.
In this view, language learning is presented as the key that opens the door
to a neatly defined version of a national culture.
This book has proposed another understanding of the learners’ linguis-
tic and cultural experience, one that merges the public and the private, the
social and the intimate in language learners’ self-assembled worlds. The
personal world of the nomadic language learner does not only consist of
CONCLUSION: THE ARTS OF LANGUAGE LEARNING 139
building intimate emotive subjective worlds, an imagined and symbolic

sphere isolated and not transferrable to others, but rather, these worlds are
constructed in the intersubjectivity, the social flow and in deep empathy
with others. In this understanding of the sphere which the language learner
inhabits, the learner is no longer tied to a particular place on the map, a
specific territory and named culture; instead he/she lays claim to a variety
of cultures and different cultural formations, whether they are national,
spiritual or artistic. In this nomadic vision of language learning, language
learners are encouraged to deterritorialise their cultural alliances to form
new connections through their emotions, figured practices and imaginings.
Whether these imaginative affectivities are the product of nostalgia, a sense
of pride, or an urge to experience something new and exciting, learners are
encouraged to leave their cultural comfort zones to venture into personal
becomings, processes of self-examination and self-betterment.
In this personally oriented understanding of SLA, language learn-
ing breaks free from the oppressive dictates of rationalist approaches to
SLA, where learning has been objectified, measured and randomised.
Instead, the ‘personal vision’ in second language learning argues for a new
focus, one that highlights the affective, the contingent and the aesthetic.
Language learning, then, is seen as life, embodied and sensed, where indi-
viduals’ experiences, their worlds, their emotions and embodied ‘impres-
sions’ become key. Indeed, the analysis in previous chapters has shown
that language learners’ narratives about their past experiences, everyday
enactments and imaginings for the future involve very personal journeys.
Feelings and emotions are located not in learners’ minds where they are
transferred and projected onto different situations, but they are part of and
shape learners’ bodies and their socialisation practices. The dwellings, mus-
ings and social practices experienced through languages are not located in
tropes of economies and returns on investment, alienated from language
learners’ lives, their interactions and their biographies, but they acquire
value in relation to how they draw from and develop their biographies.
Learners’ journeys of self-cultivation have been presented as meander-
ings through and around new cultures and learners’ history and imaginings
for the future. The markings and shapings that language learners make on
their self-made worlds of escapism and ethical engagement are the result
of these constant currents and connections between cultures. With their
out-of-the-ordinary and mundane experiences and perceptions, and their
appreciation for the more aesthetic and ethical aspects of language learn-
ing, I have argued that language learners can adopt and embody a variety
of language practices and construct their own travellers’ guises and ways
140 C. ROS I SOLÉ
of travelling the world. We have seen that language learning provides a

taste for the beautiful and the pleasurable in the aesthetics of the flâneur.
It can also provide a sense of freedom and escapism for the tourist lan-
guage learner who takes a more romantic and adventurous approach to
the language experience by emphasising the exotic and the bizarre; and it
can represent pain, effort and self-improvement in language learners who
engage in journeys of pilgrimage. Finally, the figure of the cosmopolitan
has also taught us that languages and cultures can also be interpreted,
rather than ‘judged’ by blanket moral statements that position the Other
in fixed locations. Indeed, in a cosmopolitan disposition, learners do not
‘judge’, but create cultural personal spheres that aim at feelings of con-
viviality, empathy and communion with others in cosmopolitan language
learning journeys.
I have argued that at the centre of language learners’ personal jour-
neys there is a constant negotiation of personally and socially constructed
worlds, from the exotic to the mundane where the search for linguistic
and cultural alterity allows language learners to both displace and refash-
ion these fantastic and mundane realities through their socially shaped
emotions and feelings. Such an approach to language learning dispels
the myth that the learning of an additional language is about the ster-
ile and machine-like input–output metaphor, a mere exercise of skill and
productivity of linguistic forms and meaning in a foreign language, and
competency in understanding and empathising with another culture, as
traditional approaches to intercultural communication applied to lan-
guage learning have argued. This book also hopes to have shifted a long-
held belief and paradigm in language education. Language learners are no
longer seen as guest in another culture, but rather, nomads in their own
right, travellers who are not looking for a fixed home or a destination.
They are constructed as ‘traveller people’ who can claim the legitimate
right to dwell in a multilingual world.
But this new vision of language learning would not be complete without
sketching out what the implications for practice are and what a nomadic
language learning consists of. It is in this spirit that I propose an ‘Arts of
Language Learning Manifesto’. As manifestos usually do, it aims to expose
a set of intentions and beliefs, in this case a series of ‘arts’ that nomadic lan-
guage learning could engage in in order to develop a humanistic approach
to language pedagogy that puts anarchic movement, aestheticism, percep-
tion and self-development at the centre of the experience.
CONCLUSION: THE ARTS OF LANGUAGE LEARNING 141
The ‘Arts of Language Learning Manifesto’

The key pledge of this manifesto is one that sees language enactments
as ‘arts’, a way of injecting creativity, imagination and contingency into
the act of language learning. As a reaction to the Enlightenment preoc-
cupation with rationalising and objectifying reality, the arts of language
learning claim a new way of doing, one that moves away from the efficient
reproduction of a fixed set of skills and objectives, referred to as ‘compe-
tences’ that drive language learners to an ideal of competency and mastery
of the language, to a more creative and imaginative interpretation of what
it means to speak and connect with another language. In such a vision,
language learning is about perceiving, imagining and creating something
new, a new linguistic and cultural reality. Below are some of the ‘arts’ that
could be developed in such a new approach:
1. The art of feeling. Language learners are encouraged to explore new

emotions whilst learning the new language. This can be achieved by
promoting the development of language learners’ sensibilities
towards other languages. Learners can be encouraged to talk about
their relationship with the new world around them, the objects and
the people that they socialise with, and how they shape new feelings
and acquire ‘body memories’ by moving in and interacting in the
other culture.
2. The art of wondering. The language learner enters into spiritual pro-
cesses that involve the questioning, reflection and scrutinising of
what is new and bizarre in the new language and culture. Drawing
on the romantic notion of ‘wonder’ and the leisurely but scrutinis-
ing figure of the flâneur, the language learner is expected to engage
and develop his/her curiosity, to be attracted to and to embrace the
bizarre and mysterious in the other culture. By wondering about the
Other, language learners are encouraged to understand the unknown
both by feeling a powerful pull towards the mysterious and at the
same time feeling compelled to put some order into it. The art of
wondering allows language learners to become active spectators of
the culture and apply their leisurely and reflective gaze to read the
newly refurbished cultural landscape.
3. The art of dwelling. Language learners seek to establish a deeper
connection with the spatio-temporal co-ordinates in the new cul-
tural worlds and the contingent and unexpected in life. They dwell
in another language, unafraid of not having a ‘perfect’ version of the
142 C. ROS I SOLÉ
culture. Although often drawing on the past, language dwellers are

rooted in the present. Such a disposition emphasises the fleeting and
the playful in dealing with another language. The language learner
becomes a social being who engages in meaning-making practices
and the flowing of language in social situations. Language learners
‘stumble’ with the dynamics of social life, ‘taste’ new social situa-
tions and ‘play’ new social games.
4. The art of imagining. Here, language learners in their explorations of
different cultures infuse new personal significance to their surround-
ings. They use the art of the imagination to create and perceive their
surroundings through the mirror of the self. With practice, language
learners become adept at imagining and translating the life of the
‘Other’ and skilled interpreters and authors of new versions of the
culture. Language learners imagine their own ideas of the culture by
infusing it with their desires and their visions of the self, whether
these are visions of escapism, social engagement or moral crusades.
The need to train language learners in 'Language Learning Arts' shows a

shift that locates language learning not in institutions devoted to develop
language skills but in Modern Language Departments where languages
and language learning are considered to be a branch of the humanities,
like history, literature and philosophy. In the same way that we cannot
separate language from culture (although not the same), we cannot sepa-
rate language learning from literature, poetry and history.
But while many sophisticated language learners such as language teach-
ers and accomplished linguists will relate to the values and views of lan-
guage learning presented in The Arts of Language Learning manifesto, the
language learner whose experience is limited to the regimes of pragmatic,
atomised, formal and institutionalised learning, may have missed the
world of aesthetic possibility that language learning offers for the develop-
ment of the self. Whereas it cannot be assumed that all language learners
would naturally engage in processes of self-transformation and becoming,
if languages are to have an impact not only on the self but also on today’s
complex problems of social cohesion and cultural conflicts, language
learning should be taught radically differently. This should involve not
only an engagement with the personal, the intimate, but also the social.
In order to achieve this, we should allow language learners to connect,
reflect and use the language learning process as a way to create something
new; so that language learning can become intellectually challenging and
emotionally enriching: a subversive and empowering experience.
Learners’ Information
Name Language Institution Data used Profile
Weronika Croatian/ University Interview Female, 20s, Polish-born,

Serbian Language Diary educated in Holland and in
Department Germany, postgraduate
student. Intermediate level.
Olga Croatian/ University Interview Female, 20s, English,
Serbian Language postgraduate student.
Department Intermediate level.
Antonia Arabic University Interview Female, 30s, Romanian-born,
(MSA) Language Diary journalist by profession, now
Centre a postgraduate student.
Post-Beginner.
Mary Arabic University Interview Female, 30s, English,
(MSA) Language Diary adminstrator in Government
Centre building. Post-beginner.
Emma Arabic University Interview Female, 20s, English,
(MSA) Language postgraduate student,
Centre Post-Beginner.
John Catalan Language Interview Male, 50s, businessman,
Institute Diary speaks Italian and French.
Beginner.
Marie Catalan Language Interview Female, 30s, professional,
Institute Diary speaks Spanish and Italian.
Beginner.

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-52853-7
INDEX
A Benjamin, 6, 17, 37, 39, 134n1

adoptive language, 58, 59 Bildung,5, 6, 17, 30, 33–4
aesthetic, 6, 9, 16–18, 29, 30, 37–40, body memory, 8, 43, 76, 110
78, 83, 119, 121–6, 133, borderless geography, 125
137–40, 142
aestheticism, 6, 17, 29, 37–40, 133,
138, 140 C
aesthetic orientations, 16 cartographies, 3, 19, 71, 120
affect, 3, 8, 17, 25, 35, 40, 43, 52, 75, Communicative Language Teaching
83, 85, 87, 95, 96, 98, 103 (CLT), 1, 3, 17,
affective, 6, 23n5, 26, 30, 32, 34, 35, 37, 88, 125, 138
37, 40, 42, 49, 64, 79, 83, 91, cosmopolitan, 14, 16, 59, 64, 72,
92, 96, 98–102, 139 73, 75, 80, 81, 83, 90, 111,
affective filter, 96, 98, 99 114, 123, 130–3, 140
affectivity, 14, 42, 51 creative, 1, 4–8, 24, 25, 29, 30,
agency, 8, 23, 35, 47, 48, 54–6, 62–4, 35, 49, 50, 66, 95, 114, 141
77, 96, 98, 102, 103 creativity, 3, 23, 24, 29, 34, 35,
art for art’s sake, 6, 30, 37, 78 49–52, 75, 102, 103, 140
critical analysis, 14
B
Bakhtin, 49, 50 D
banal cosmopolitanism, 111, 130 Deleuze, vii, 17, 40, 65, 74
becoming, vii, viii, 25, 39, 41–3, 52, deterritorialised, 8, 71, 75, 84
61, 67, 78, 90, 107, 116, 126, deterritorialised experience, 8
131, 132, 139, 142 diasporic life, 124

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-52853-7
146 INDEX
difference, 24, 41, 47, 49, 54, 66, 83, humanities, viii, 13–15, 17–21, 142
90, 100, 126, 130, 132, 133 Humboldt, 5, 17, 30, 33, 34, 82
dwell, 41, 44, 92, 140, 141
dwelling, 3, 41, 74–5, 77, 106, 107, 141
I
identity, 2–4, 7, 14, 16, 18, 20, 22,
E 25, 26, 31, 33, 44, 47–67, 72,
emotion, 4, 8, 34–6, 51, 95, 96, 98, 73, 75, 78, 79, 89,
100, 104–7, 109, 110, 112–15 91, 97, 102, 129–31
emotional self, 100 identity patchworks, 56
emotions, 8, 9, 18, 19, 25, 32, 37, 57, imagination, 6, 7, 17, 19, 24, 30,
67n3, 77, 90, 95–116, 138–41 34–6, 42, 47, 49–52, 62, 64,
emotions objects, 96, 104, 106–7 67, 75, 77, 79, 84, 89, 97,
‘emotion work,’ 8, 96, 98, 105, 109, 120, 122, 128, 132,
110, 112 140, 142
empathic, 7, 66 intercultural studies, 15
empiricist, 3, 5, 13, 14, 138 intersubjective, 7, 21, 23, 36, 59, 67,
Enlightenment, 5, 13, 16–18, 34, 140 75–7, 90, 101, 103
Enlightenment rationalism, 34 intersubjectively, 39, 66, 77
epistemologies of language learning, intersubjectivities, 4, 122, 138
4, 19 intersubjectivity, 17, 21–3, 32, 47,
48, 66, 67, 76, 77, 91, 137, 138
F
feelings, 8, 18, 19, 23, 25, 31–3, 55, L
57, 58, 60, 62, 63, 67, 80, 87, languaculture, 21, 22, 24, 40,
95–7, 100, 102–5, 108–15, 129, 62, 105
139–41 language education, 3, 13, 15–17, 19,
figuration(s), 7, 21, 23, 24, 30, 42, 21, 33, 52, 58, 72, 140
47, 48, 51, 53, 56, 65–7, 71, 75, ‘languages of the heart,’ 58, 59
78, 91, 131 languaging, 16, 41, 42, 74
figured worlds, 64, 65 liberation, 9, 17, 53, 97, 110–11,
flâneur, 6, 37–40, 123–6, 133, 134n1, 119, 121
139, 141 lifestyle, 38, 59–61, 75, 79–82, 89,
flâneuse,38, 39 126, 127, 134n1
fractured identities, 7 lifeworld(s), 7, 8, 16, 39, 66,
71–92
lines of flight, vii, viii, 41
H
humanisation project, 17
humanistic, 1, 4, 5, 13–17, 20, 21, M
33, 140 myth-making, 6, 29, 30, 42
INDEX 147
N poststructuralist, 17, 20, 47, 48,

new data, 21, 22 53–6, 61, 66, 75, 77
nomad, 6, 30, 42, 49 practices of the self, 63, 132
nomadic, 6–8, 30, 40–2, 47, 48, 51–3, project of the self, 53, 62, 63
64, 65, 71, 75, 77, 78, 85,
89–92, 120–3, 137–40
nomadic state, 6, 30, 42 R
nomadism, 7, 9, 17, 29, 30, rationalism, 14, 16–18, 34
40–3, 48, 119 rationalist, 3, 5, 13, 16–18, 29, 40,
nostalgia, 79, 80, 109–10, 43, 98, 139
127, 128, 139 rhizomatic figurations, 65–7
romantic(s), 6, 9, 17, 22, 29, 30,
34–6, 38–40, 49–52, 82, 90,
P 110–11, 115, 119, 121, 125–8,
perception, 3, 7, 8, 14, 17, 23, 29–31, 133, 138, 140, 141
35–7, 43, 52, 55, 71,
76, 77, 98, 140
perform, 41, 91 S
performativity, 20, 21, 23, 41, 42 the self, 1, 4–7, 16, 17, 24, 25, 29,
performing, 32, 38, 41, 42, 132 30, 33–5, 37, 40, 43, 47–9,
personal, viii, 1–9, 13, 15–19, 21, 22, 51–3, 55, 56, 62–4, 80, 83, 87,
24–6, 29–33, 36, 48–50, 52, 53, 89–91, 97, 101, 113,
55, 58–60, 63, 65, 67, 71–9, 114, 116, 119, 130, 132, 142
81–3, 86, 87, 90, 91, 95–8, 101, self-cultivation, 19, 33, 59, 78, 82, 87,
102, 114, 116, 119, 121, 122, 129, 137, 139
125, 127, 128, 132, 133, self-reflection, 6, 19, 30
137–40, 142 sociality, 9, 74, 92, 95, 96, 103, 105,
the personal, viii, 1, 4–6, 13, 16, 18, 112–15, 122
19, 22, 25, 29, 30, 49, 58, 59, souvenir, 96, 108, 109
67, 72, 76, 87, 97, Spracherleben,8, 71, 75–89, 91
102, 116, 121, 125, 133, 138 subjectivities, 4, 24, 49, 56, 57, 74,
personal development, 16, 21, 33, 90, 101, 113, 114, 122, 138
101, 116, 122, 138 subjectivity, 6, 7, 16, 17, 19, 21–3,
personalising, 85, 101 26, 30, 32, 35, 42, 44, 47, 48,
person-in-practice, 62, 63 53, 57, 62, 66, 67, 76, 77, 91,
phenomenological, 5, 7, 8, 13, 14, 16, 101, 114, 125, 137, 138
18, 20, 30, 43, 53, 71, 76, 77, 87 subverting, 6, 30, 32, 42
phenomenology, 13, 17, symbolic artefacts, 108
29, 43–4, 138 symbolic competence, 35, 44,
pilgrim, 9, 120–3, 128–30, 133, 140 53, 101
positivist, 14, 19, 24 symbolic spaces, 16, 75
148 INDEX
T 115, 119–23, 126, 127, 131,

tourist, viii, 9, 41, 56, 63, 81, 83, 90, 133, 139
91, 97, 108, 119, 121–3, 125–8, traveller, 9, 51, 97, 119–22, 125–7,
133, 140 133, 139, 140
trajectories, 14, 24, 30, 62–5, 74, 90,
104, 114, 120, 122
transformation of the self, 1, 4, 80 U
travel, 2, 6, 9, 30, 38, 42, 49, 50, 61, utilitarianism, 19
62, 73, 79–81, 88, 89, 110, 111, utopia, 9, 36, 73, 82, 119, 121, 128

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THE PERSONAL

The Personal World

The Open University

ISBN 978-1-137-52852-0 ISBN 978-1-137-52853-7 (eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016958109

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Pivot imprint is published by Springer Nature

Phipps, A. (2007). Learning the arts of linguistic survival: Languaging, tourism,

Professor of Languages and Intercultural Studies Alison Phipps

1 Introduction: From Sense to Sensibility 1

2 Humanising Language Learning 13

5 Brave New Lifeworlds 71

6 The Social Promise of Emotions 95

8 Conclusion: The Arts of Language Learning 137

Introduction: From Sense to Sensibility

Abstract The development of Modern Foreign Languages (MFL)

Keywords Modern Foreign Languages • English Language Teaching

© The Author(s) 2016 1

When I was at primary school my teacher told me I should not read so

of inhabiting another language or sounding like someone else. But many

tence was based on more socio-cultural and ethnographic understandings

Chapter 2, ‘The Humanisation of Language Learning’, argues for a

Finally, I will draw on phenomenological philosophy and its theory of

self and his/her place and ownership of a multilingual world. Such an

Chapter 7, ‘Life in a Caravan’, describes language learners’ experi-

Pavlenko, A. (2005). Emotions and Multilingualism. Cambridge: Cambridge

Humanising Language Learning

Abstract This chapter argues for a radical shift in Second Language

Keywords Personal • Experiential • Subjective • Second Language

© The Author(s) 2016 13

The discipline of Second Language Acquisition and the humanities have

methods, to study ‘the complexity of the human experience and the

We need an engagement or re-engagement with discussions of language in

Language Education, however, has developed in a different direction.

Moving on from Enlightenment Rationalism

was underpinned by a modernist philosophy and a rationalist project that

(Mustakas 1994; Merleau-Ponty 2012). In doing this, the ‘humanising

Reuniting Body and Mind

the rational project of the Enlightenment, with the language learning

The challenge facing the human sciences is to describe things in themselves,

(2004) pointed out flaws in current epistemologies of language learning.

The Humanities in Current SLA Theory

Such theoretical incursions have gone hand in hand with a different

Challenging the Remit and Scope of SLA

1. Languaculture: Such a concept signals a different conceptualisation

(Firth and Wagner 1997), the focusing on the experiential in lan-

Within such an understanding of language learning, language learners are

A New Paradigm for Language Learning

T. Omoniyi (Eds.), Contending with Globalization in World Englishes

Norton, B. (2000). Identity in Language Learning: Gender, Ethnicity and

Keywords Subject • Creativity • Romanticism • Aestheticism

© The Author(s) 2016 29

Language learning goes beyond the purely linguistic in the communica-

Finally, I will draw in phenomenological philosophy and its theory

In a very short time, she forced me to achieve something beyond the

Elias Canetti’s experience of German is a mixture of pain and pleasure;

the result of obeying an educational curriculum, but it was motivated

Elias Canetti’s example of learning of German is a powerful reminder

‘Bildung’ or the Cultivation of the Self

This is how the nineteenth-century linguist, philosopher and educa-

would not be experimenting with a new way of looking at language

Until comparatively recently, indeed, probably until the immediate post-war

expressive powers and imaginations. The Romantic movement gave

Professor of Languages and Intercultural Studies Alison Phipps

1 Introduction: From Sense to Sensibility 1

2 Humanising Language Learning 13

5 Brave New Lifeworlds 71

6 The Social Promise of Emotions 95

8 Conclusion: The Arts of Language Learning 137