My project—to explore the multilayered complexity of the discoursal space which mediates the relation between language and identity and day-to-day practice, its various material effects and notional forms, and the taken-for-granted “historical forever”—has at least three dimensions. One dimension describes the different perspectives from which language can be viewed: as contingent experience and practices, as fields of material effects and notional forms, and as the taken-for-granted “historical forever.” A second dimension describes the codified, embodied, and ontological characteristics of language. Another dimension examines the dialogic, systemic, and normative manifestations of everyday practice as it is framed by and takes place through language.
This examination of the reflexive and interconnected complexity of language provides an analytical lens that can distinguish between the codified, embodied, and ontological characteristics of language on the one hand, and its dialogic, systemic and normative manifestations on the other. Kramsch (1993) makes a useful distinction between the normative, embodied, and symbolic aspects of language, describing the different viewpoints from which
the substantive, procedural, and performative aspects of language can be understood. In her three-dimensional frame, language “expresses social reality”—it is the way in which people refer to the stock of knowledge, understandings, attitudes, and beliefs other people share.
Language also “embodies cultural reality”—it is the way people create meaning through the different mediums of language available to them. Finally, language “symbolizes cultural reality”—it describes the way in which language consists of a system of signs and symbols which themselves have a cultural value.
Focusing the analytical lens from these different vantage points suggests that the different understandings teachers have of language affects the ways in which they approach their teaching. Norbert emphasizes the importance of teaching international and immigrant students “crucial” concepts and “hard” vocabulary and argues for an organized approach toward making transparent, modelling, and scaffolding linguistic knowledge. The attention that she pays to the meaningful aspects of language in her other classes is constrained by her perception that time constraints and the students’ best interests are best met by a strong emphasis on the structural, technical, and symbolic aspects of language. Rogers’s greater attention to the meaningful and performative aspects of language—its “social grammar of roles, settings, rules of speaking, and norms”—indicates his awareness of the ways that language provides the mechanism through which students interact with the world and portray their identities, even as they use language to embody meaning. His teaching approach focuses on the technical and strategic aspects of language learning and the ways that students perform their language practice at home and within the school context. Like Norbert, Rogers
is concerned that students do not work within the classroom in expected ways. His teaching approach focuses on the ways that students can learn about, integrate, and perform essential classroom skills and roles in established ways that he understands as being in binary relation to those the students practice at home or within their home country. Finally, the signs and symbols of texts that make up the ways that language is used to perform the activities and embody the identities we inhabit within the everyday world are promulgated in shared ways of understanding, being, and behaving, made sense of and spoken about reflexively through the privileged medium of language. Chambers works with each student to ensure that they understand the meaning context as well as the linguistic notions they need to understand their work. She encourages students to read varieties of texts, read their materials for meaning and structure as well as for their expression and institutes a variety of techniques—simulation games, videos, creative writing tasks—to help students understand the narrative and normative context.
Kramsch’s (1993) point is that this negotiation between different aspects of language takes place within the broader context of a social world articulated through language. Language describes the ways that we understand and speak about the social world in which we act and in which “meaning is produced and exchanged,” even as it is the principal means through which we conduct our everyday lives. Articulated through language, the culture of everyday practices draws on commonalities of shared history and traditions, the ways that people are positioned, belong, and share in that history, as they are meaningful and appear as “normal.” Gee and Green’s (1998, p. 127) notion of the
“reflexive” aspect of language “in which language always takes on a
specific meaning from the actual context in which it is used, while, simultaneously, helping to construct what we take that context to mean and be in the first place” brings to view a social world mapped out within the quagmire of unequally empowered and competing discourses. Language and identity are crucially linked as language shapes the different ways people are understood and included within a society, even as it provides the mechanism of their identification.
Unpicking this complexity suggests another set of vantage points from which the data can be viewed, as language may be seen as performance, in that it is dialogued and mediated. The symbolic, embodied, and notional conditions of language as they are understood and produced through language are the focus of sociocultural and sociolinguistic literature. Kramsch’s (1993) interrogation of the codified, embodied, and meaningful aspects of language are site and subject of the normative concepts and materialities which shape everyday understanding and behaviors. It is through negotiation and mediation of the normative and systemic, as well as the symbolic and substantive, aspects of language that the “justification” and the
“dialectic resolution” of such day-to-day tensions are made transparent. In Stuart Hall’s (1997) terms, the signs and symbols of texts and the activities of the everyday which make up the binary of language/culture are promulgated in shared ways of understanding, being, and behaving made sense of and spoken about through the privileged medium of language. The embodiment of language, along with the subjectivity of those who perform it, is in a sense a
“performance” in which a self-conscious performer chooses an act, which is “performed.” Power operates through the creation of different subject identities in ways that strengthen and legitimize them
through countless acts of reiteration and performance that seek “to introduce a reality rather than report on an existing one” (Butler, 1997, p. 33). Students and teachers perform, “make sense of the world,” and
“explore the possibilities available to them” through the medium of language (Britton, in Kostogriz & Doecke, 2008, p. 261). The roles available to students and the ways they are embodied within their experience are set up within countless behaviors and understandings developed historically, but assumed to be “normal.”
The complex, multidimensional interchange that underpins the process of performance and its formulation through and about language is contained within the relationship between the “utterance [the word or sentence] and its meaningful and inseparable relationship with the communication” (Bakhtin, 1981; Day, 2002, p. 11). The principle of dialogicality—that the addressee and speaker have a mutual role in the construction of utterances—emphasizes the complex interrelation between self and other that underpins communicative activity with others as identities struggle for the
“symbolic freedom” to create a voice from the resources at their disposal, and in response to the voices of others. Language teaching practice takes place within a fundamentally social context in which language provides the frame and the means of negotiating its very terms and conditions. It is part of a process of “symbolic domination”
whereby certain social groups maintain control over others by establishing their view of reality and their cultural practices as the most valued and, perhaps more importantly, as “the norm” (Bourdieu, 2007). The specifically sociolinguistic properties of discourse have power as they express the social authority and social consequence of those who utter them. The ideas expressed by speakers and listeners
in everyday classrooms are mediated by an “ontological complicity”
between how we have come to define the world “objectively” and the internalized structures that provide the framework or ways to understand and work within that world.
That utterances are “languaged,” even as they take place within a context made visible and performed through language, provides the basis of the relationship between language, identity, and pedagogy interrogated here. Teachers and students are positioned and assigned identities through categorizations that “rely on the recognition of difference.” Boundaries are drawn around those which are the same, as opposed to those which those within the category are not (Rattansi, 2007, p. 115). The positioning and identification of subjects is made through difference, as people are defined, placed, and called into being through an ensemble of social practices and technologies (Luke, 2003). In a social world described within the tangle of unequally empowered and competing discourses, language and culture become the site and subject of the different ways people are understood and included within a society. The character of voice and the bodily performance of language mark who we are and what we can become, just as physical characteristics such as skin colour do (Arber, 2008a, 2008b; Rizvi, 1995, 2005). Language, as the mechanism through which we understand and act upon the world, becomes the frame through which the terror and violence of unequally empowered social worlds is maintained. The ontological conditions which make these notions meaningful (from their different perspectives) may be changed, but they are changed through the framing power of language (Dwyer, 1997; Fanon, 1990; Said, 1991). The normalization of the way-things-are naturalizes the ways the world is known and hides the
manner in which some are remade as “other.” The social world becomes accepted within the paradigm of the imagery, traditions of thought, and vocabulary provided within the taken-for-grantedness of the everyday language “we” use to describe our identity in relation to a notional “other” (Bhabha, 1994).