Language teaching and learning has many different cultural dimensions, and over the years more and more of these have been the subject of research. The first dimension to be explored was that of content: the images of target language countries and the world that were offered in textbooks and presented in class. The next dimension was that of the learner: the (inter)cultural learning, competence and identity of the learner or subject. The next dimension was context: the situation and role of language teaching and learning in society and in the world.
Researchers in the field have drawn upon anthropology, sociology, cultural and political studies, referring to such scholars as E. Hall, Geertz, Hannerz, Agar, Appadurai, Bourdieu, Habermas, Bakhtin, Giroux, and S. Hall. Since the 1980s they have also drawn on studies of language: sociolinguistics, critical discourse analysis, pragmatics, semantics and cognitive linguistics, referring to such scholars as Hymes, Gumperz, Fairclough, Scollon & Scollon, Kasper, Lakoff, Vygotsky, Wertsch, and Lier. Research into language teaching and learning has been seen by some scholars as a sub-field of intercultural communication (see Jackson forthcoming).
The field has always had a distinctive interdisciplinary character with multiple theoretical and philosophical positions. It is a wide field that is becoming still wider, and is characterized to a large extent by monographs in which authors present their own platforms, sometimes without very many references to other scholars in the field at large. It can therefore be difficult to trace specific lines of argument. A more comprehensive presentation can be found in Risager (Reference Risager2007), which deals with the history of the field with special reference to the development of the national paradigm in international culture pedagogy since the 1880s and the signs of a transition to a transnational paradigm since the 1990s.
Items in the research timeline presented below are annotated with one or more of the following categories, which are not discrete but are useful for our purposes:
A1 deals with the content dimension and takes a national approach, focusing on one or more countries
A2 also deals with the content dimension but takes a transnational or global/local approach, focusing on cultural complexity and hybridity
B deals with the learner dimension: intercultural learning, intercultural competence
C deals with the context dimension: language teaching seen in a wider social and political perspective
X draws on the humanities and/or the social sciences, including anthropology, psychology and literature
Y draws on political science, including citizenship studies
Z draws on studies of language
Given space limitations, titles are given in the original language(s) only. Readers interested in their English translations should contact the author at risager@ruc.dk or consult Risager (Reference Risager2007).
Karen Risager is Professor of Cultural Encounters at Roskilde University, Denmark. Her research field is the relationship between language and culture in a transnational and global perspective, and language and culture pedagogy with special reference to the history of the cultural dimensions of foreign and second language teaching and learning. Her publications in the field are numerous, and include the two books listed above.
1 Byram, M. (ed.) (1993). Germany: Its representation in textbooks for teaching German in Great Britain. Frankfurt a.M: Diesterweg.
2 Fairclough, N. (1989). Language and power. London & New York: Longman.
3 Bakhtin, M. M. (1981). The dialogic imagination. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press.
4 Bourdieu, P. (1977). Esquisse d'une théorie de la pratique. Genève: Librairie Droz.
5 Byram, M. & G. Zarate (1994). Definitions, objectives and assessment of socio-cultural competence. The Council of Europe, CC-LANG (94) 1.
6 Palmer, G. B. (1996). Towards a theory of cultural linguistics. Austin: University of Texas Press.
