Im Gespräch: An Interview with ClaireKramsch on the “Multilingual Subject”

Claire KramschUniversity of California, Berkeley

Sascha GerhardsUniversity of California, Davis

Inher recentlypublishedbook TheMultilingualSubject: What foreign language learners say abouttheir experience and why it matters, UC Berkeleyapplied-linguist Claire Kramsch approaches lan-guage learning from a new, visionary perspective.Foregrounding the interplay of cultural aspects inlanguage learning, Kramsch understands languagelearners as multilingual subjects whose experienceis not grounded primarily in the memorization ofgrammatical rules, but rather in the subjectiveexperience of learning and using the new language.In Kramsch’s view, the multilingual subject finds inthe new language not simply an intellectual or“practical” undertaking, but also an outlet for allkinds of dreams and aspirations. These are often-times closely connected to issues of identity, asKramsch shows in her book. Consequently, lan-guage shapes the learner and fosters her or his de-velopment and progress as a multilingual subject.Thenewunderstandingof thepositionof the learneralso can impact expectation learners have of theteacher. Instead of regarding language solely as theaccumulation of labels for the “familiar furniture ofthe universe,” Kramsch encourages teachers to fo-cus much more on the visceral, physical, subjectiveexperience of learning and using a language.

In February 2012, I met with Claire Kramsch todiscuss The Multilingual Subject and to learn moreabout the idea of the embodied self in the languageclassroom, the aesthetic dimension in languagelearning and teaching, and the beauty of the Ger-man language in particular. Being a multilingualsubject myself, one who interacts, writes, and pub-lishes in a foreign language, I was particularly inter-ested in Professor Kramsch’s take on the obstaclesof foreign language learning and the effort to defineone’s identity as a multilingual subject. My goal was

to find out why The Multilingual Subject is such animportant and useful book for teachers, and whyKramsch so highly values the idea of “pleasure” inlanguage learning.

SG: Let me start by congratulating you on the suc-cess of The Multilingual Subject to date.CK: Thank you very much.

SG: What was the impetus for the writing of TheMultilingual Subject?CK: There has been a lot written about emotionsand perceptions and subjectivities in the learningof English as a second language, but many of mycolleagues in applied linguistics tend to think thatforeign language learning is all of question oflearning dry conjugations, declensions, vocabu-lary and grammar that have nothing to do with theemotional life of the learner, particularly learnerswho are thought to be elite learners, that is learnerswho do not have an absolute necessity to learn aforeign language. They are not immigrants thatneed to learn the language of the host country, andso there is this misconception that learning a for-eign language in a classroom has nothing to dowith subjective reactions to the language. I wantedto counteract that perception.

SG: Very interesting, and this actually leads per-fectly to my next question. Could you explain, in afew sentences: What is the “multilingual subject”?How is it different from just calling someone a “sec-ond-language learner” or “second-languageuser”?

CK: The original title for this book was Subjectivityin Language Learning. It was clear that I wanted to

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focus on the subjective aspects of language learn-ing. But subjectivity in language learning, the re-viewers felt, was a little too abstract. They felt thatThe Multilingual Subject was a much more con-crete, attention-grabbing title. But the reason why Icalled it The Multilingual Subject was to attract theattention of the readers to the fact that learning alanguage even in a classroom and even outside ofthe environment in which that language is taughtengages not only the learners’ cognitive frame-work and their pragmatic communicative compe-tence, but all kinds of subjective aspects includingissues of identity. Particularly among adolescentswho learn a foreign language in school, like mostadolescents in most countries, they are by defini-tion in search of self between ages 12 and 20. Sothey often find in that second or foreign languagean outlet for all kinds of dreams and aspirationsthat they don’t find in their own language.

SG: So you wanted to present the multilingualsubject vis-à-vis the classical or traditional percep-tion of second language learner?

CK: Yes. The word subject I take from JuliaKristeva. This is something that you become. Youare not born a subject. Language shapes who youare and you become a subject throughout your lifein contact with various symbolic systems, includinglanguage. That is why Kristeva talks about the“subject in process.” By putting the subject in thereI was focusing on the subjectivity and the identity ofthe learner.

SG: In The Multilingual Subject you engage ina critical reexamination of one of the central ideasof your 1993 book, Context and Culture in Lan-guage Teaching, namely that of the “interculturalthird space.” What led you to rethink that idea, andhave you moved beyond that “third space”?

CK: In my 1993 book, when I coined the termthird place, I was directly inspired by HomiBhabha’s third space in his book The Location ofCulture. I was not aware that almost at the sametime there were a whole lot of people in educationwriting about third space or third place. These werepeople like Alex Kostogriz who were using the termthird space for immigrants, in particular to the U.S.and in particular Hispanics and Spanish speakers,who were finding this third space between thedominant culture and the minority culture. Andthey were using this third space or place in thatrather static way. I wanted to distinguish myselffrom the use of third place by scholars in educationbecause I felt in foreign language education you

don’t deal necessarily with minorities; or with im-migrants. I wanted to get away from that. Butmostly, since 1993, I have read many ecologicalperspectives on language learning and teaching,on complexity theory, on postmodern views of sec-ond language acquisition, so I’ve been influencedby a view of place, if you wish, not as a product butas a process. I wanted to find a term that is less staticthan third place and I wanted to embed it in apostmodern view of the process of acquisition. Thisled me to the notion of symbolic competence,which I found confirmed through data that my stu-dent, Ann Whiteside, collected in San Francisco’smission district. Observing multilinguals at playingwith their different languages in everyday lifeshowed me that it’s not so much a question of placeas it is a competence of a symbolic nature. It was acapacity or process that people were using to posi-tion themselves socially, culturally, and emotion-ally as subjects in conversations, etc. So I needed aconcept that was more flexible and more fluid thanthe notion of place.

SG: So what should language teachers be fo-cusing on, what should they derive from this newperception?

CK: What they should derive is that learning alanguage is not just a question of accumulating la-bels of what I call the “familiar furniture of the uni-verse.” It is an engagement of the whole person ifonly because you need to train your vocal chords toproduce sounds that are not usually yours, to writein a way that is different from yours, and that thebody is involved in that. Then I came to this ideathat language teachers should be much moreaware that the bodies they have in front of them inthe classroom are, in fact, acquiring the languagewith all their senses; not just their brains, but theireyes, their ears, their touching, their smell, theirtaste, and that they should appeal to the senses in amuch greater way than they usually do. Most teach-ers tend to focus on vocabulary, on exchange ofinformation when they put students in groups.

SG: That’s what, in your book, you call the vis-ceral, physical, subjective experience of learningand using a new language.

CK: Yes.

SG: Can you also comment on the apparentdisconnect between the idea of the embodied selfand the ways we usually teach languages in class-rooms?

CK: This idea of the embodied self is an idea

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that has been proposed by feminist thinkers like Ju-dith Butler, sociologists like Pierre Bourdieu, andby postmodern thinkers like Michel Foucault.While language teaching still is operating with bitsof information and labels, codes, structures, and isfocused exclusively on the structural aspects of thelanguage, in Cultural Studies we have gone be-yond thinking in terms of structures. Languageteachers have to become aware of this disconnectbetween the way we usually teach languages andthe embodied self. But there is another reason andthat is a political reason. After 9/11, the Americanpublic suddenly realized that even though theymight speak other languages, they don’t under-stand other peoples’ worldviews. So after 9/11, it’sno longer a question of being able to speak the vo-cabulary of other people. It’s a question of under-standing where they come from, the knowledgethat their historical bodies have accumulated: un-derstanding their memories, understanding howthey interpret history, and understanding how theyimagine the future. It’s introducing time and thetimeof thebody.Thebody is likeabodymap. It hasa memory that your mind does not have and yourvisceral reaction of like or dislike to other people orto other languages comes from age-old or child-hood memories that are still active in what you as-sociatewith thesedifferent languages.That’swhat Icall the embodied learning. It’s linked to childhoodmemories, to adolescent dreams, fantasies, aspira-tions etc.

SG: In discussing “the narratorial self” in chap-ter 2 you write that SLA theory has mainly focusedon “knowing that” and “knowing how to” but youindicate that ”private memory and imagination inlanguage learning: remembering how and im-agining what if (future scenarios for action)" areabsent from SLA theory. By extension, is this “nar-ratorial self” absent in the language classroom?

CK: I like that question. Of course, it’s not likecommunicative language teaching has not alwaysused narration, and in fact to narrate is one of theskills on the ACTFL scale. It’s been a skill that youuse to make people talk. But it has been used withinthe framework of an exchange of information. Younarrate, meaning you report, on events that aretaking place, but you don’t use narration as a wayof exploiting the memories and the aspirations ofthe students. In other words, you are again usinglanguage just to exchange information or to con-vey information, but not to play around with differ-ent scenarios or to remember different possibilities,which I call the aesthetic dimension of learning.

SG: How then, can or should language teach-ers, particularly those teaching the introductorylevels, integrate the physical, subjective experienceof learning a language into what they do in theclassroom? I am particularly thinking of teacherswho are teaching a language that is not their nativelanguage, so they do not necessarily have the mem-ory background, the cultural background, or theimaginative potential to really imagine “what if”?

CK: That’s where my approach is different fromthe many approaches that have been advocatingusing feelings, emotions, and even psychothera-peutic discourse in the classroom. There are plentyof approaches to language learning that have ad-vocated tapping into the physical experience oflearning a language. Total Physical Response, theDirect Method, Community Language Learning,Suggestopedia. In the sixties and seventies, therewere various approaches to language that involvedthe subjective self. But it was never exploited to re-ally capitalize on the personal memories, projec-tions and fantasies of the student. And they neveracquired an aesthetic dimension. The reason whythey never acquired an aesthetic dimension is be-cause they did not focus on the impact of languageitself of words themselves on the senses. And that’swhere the non-native speaker is at a distinct advan-tage. For the native speaker, these words are usedevery day; you become numb to them, unless youare a poet or a student of literature. For the averagenative speaker, the language is part of the furniture.But for a non-native speaker, words have a new-ness to them that can be capitalized on. Why notask the students not so much “how do you say thisor that”, but, “What is your favorite word?” or“What color is that word?” I’ve never heard ateacher say, “What color is the word haberdash-ery” for example. The French poet Arthur Rimbaudhad this synesthetic approach to language, and I’msure that several of our students in the classroomare able to see vowels and words in different colors.Take Nabokov as an example: Nabokov is full ofcolors and shapes for words. Why not capitalize onthat? And that would tap the aesthetic aspect of thelanguage. I have an example here. No nativespeaker would ever speak like that. One of our Ger-man students felt like the German word “Streß” isentangled and much more stressful than the Eng-lish word stress because it’s got this Eszett. Now thatis fascinating.

SG: In the same vein, the perception of theword “Hass”…

CK: … exactly, by the Japanese speaker…

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SG: … who has completely different associa-tions when hearing the word “Hass.”

CK: Absolutely.

SG: Now this was with respect to the teacher.What about the student? Not every student has hada subjective experience learning a language whenentering, for the first time, the introductory levelclassroom. In their evaluations, my students tend toemphasize that I helped them connect to the cultureof the target language, German in this case, by shar-ing my own experiences as a multilingual subject.How important is the identification with the targetlanguage/culture through a mediator? Can/shouldthe teacher share his own memories?

CK: You should definitely share your knowl-edge of the culture. Even more important is thatyou share your love of the culture. Your love be-cause it’s your own or because you feel warmlyenough vis-à-vis that language and the culture toteach it, sometimes for twenty, thirty, forty years.Anything that lets the passion of the teacherthrough is absolutely invaluable. That’s what is go-ing to bridge the gap for the students between selfand other. And what I find to be quite honest inGerman. Many teachers of German never saywhat a beautiful language it is. They say, it’s a usefullanguage, it’s a practical language, it’s the languageof Volkswagen and BMW, but I rarely hear my col-leagues say: It’s beautiful. Before I learned Ger-man, I had never been exposed to a rhythmiclanguage, “mit Hebungen und Senkungen.” InFrench, I had only had Alexandrine verses in whichwe counted the number of syllables, but all of a sud-den I encountered German poetry and its rhythm.It can be sung so well, it can be recited so well, it hasthis rhythm that is absolutely irresistible.

SG: We will have to get back to the rhythm andmelody of German in one of my last questions. Sofar, we’ve talked about teachers and we’ve talkedabout students. In this book you make use of arange of data to support your arguments. You useboth conventional language data from classroomlearners, such as one would see in other applied lin-guistics studies. But you also delve into languageautobiographies, including Elias Canetti, EvaHoffman, Nathalie Saurraute, and others. How doyou see the experiences of those authors informingthe everyday practice of language teaching?

CK: I’m delighted that language memoirs havecome to be recognized as valid sources of data forApplied Linguistics. I’m very grateful to people likeAneta Pavlenko and Celeste Kinginger for having

used these language memoirs. We are dealing herewith authors who write literary autobiographies.They not only have the rich experiential back-ground to talk about these things but they also havethe verbal ability to put those experiences intowords and not everybody can do that. I’m usinglanguage memoirs now in my course on issues inbilingualism. Of course I have the students read theresearch, but each one of them also has to read oneautobiography to get a sense of the fullness of theexperience and that learning a language is not justcommunicative competence in that sense. It’s alsoa celebration of language itself and a discovery ofyour own self through the foreign medium.

SG: Very interesting. Now to a completely dif-ferent topic: In your chapter entitled “The virtualself,” you explore learners’ subjectivities throughelectronic communication. You describe how lan-guage learners’ relationship to time, space, otherspeakers, and themselves is qualitatively differentthrough digital media compared with convention-al, face-to-face communication. Do you see thedigital communication, then, as completely distinctfrom face-to-face communication, or has therebeen a blurring of the boundaries between the two?In either case, what are the implications for lan-guage teaching in general, or German languageteaching in particular?

CK: The digital medium is quite different fromface-to-face communication. If the medium is themessage, we already are in quite different configu-ration and quite a different environment. What Ifind interesting is that more and more of our stu-dents are blurring the boundaries between the twomedia. They chat in face-to-face the way they chaton Facebook. I find that the medium has changedthe meaning of communication itself. The commu-nicative approach was meant to enter into dialoguewith the foreign Other in order to find out what thisforeign Other thought, what his/her world viewwas, and to understand the Other. But you don’tchat on Facebook in order to really understand theOther. It’s like a monologue-dialogue. You postthings, you respond to things, but you don’t have adeep involvement in understanding the worldviewof the Other. You’re only happy to exchange posts.I’m concerned about that. What are we training ourstudents for? To be good communicators on theInternet? Or to eventually, when they go to Ger-many, for instance, enter into face-to-face commu-nication not only with other Internet users, butmaybe with grandmothers and grandfathers whodon’t have Internet and who have quite a different

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style of communication? That’s a concern to me.Concerning the boundaries: I’m always for bound-aries. I can’t emphasize enough that we can’t becreative without boundaries. While I welcome anymode of communication that will put us in touchwith foreign speakers, I like to think that the foreignis not the self, the Other is not the self, and that weshould focus on these boundaries and discussthese boundaries. We should not try to eliminatethem because otherwise you will not know what isthe self and what is the Other.

SG: This brings to mind a question that I hadnot had on my list. Do you think that online com-munication affects filters, too? I’m thinking of a for-mer student who addressed me before class oneday, saying: “Heydude, areyouoneof theTAs?”

CK: In the U.S., there never was, as comparedto Europe, any sense of social strata or appropri-ateness. A lot of our students speak in the class-room the way they speak with their peers, full of“like” and “wow.” Every other word they say is“like.” The case that you’re mentioning is an ex-treme case. I think most students would know thedifference between how to talk to a TA or a profes-sor and how to talk to their peers. But it’s true, espe-cially in writing; the Internet fosters a certain kind ofwriting that you find reflected in the essays. Manyessays are much more verbose, vague, and quicklywritten than they used to be. Students are not usedto reading texts by paying attention to the wording.They get the gist and they’re satisfied with the gist,but when you pin them down on the choice ofwords, they find you picky. And yet, it’s that atten-tion to details that gives you the tone, the style andthe deeper meaning of the text.

SG: The next question goes in the same direc-tion. There are a variety of dangers in virtual com-munication that go beyond the realm of languagelearning. For instance, words cannot replace facialexpressions, tone of voice, and other aspects offace-to-face communication. Misunderstandingscan thus occur not only between individuals with adifferent linguistic and cultural background, butalso between two speakers who share an L1. Themisunderstanding between Marie and Rob de-scribed in your chapter “The virtual self” is a goodexample. To what extent is this problem (dis-)con-nected from/to language learning?

CK: I think the computer exacerbates a prob-lem that already exists independently of foreignlanguage learning. One could imagine that Roband another American girl, for instance, could have

had the same problem; if they came, one from theWest Coast and the other from the East Coast, orone from a working class family and the other fromthe upper middle class. But these things are exacer-bated by the computer, which enables you to get intouch with people from a different social class, froma different social milieu, from a different region, orfrom an urban or rural setting. Interlocutors getessentialized as one German and one American.One tends to forget the different historical back-grounds of the two interlocutors in the case of Roband Marie. The computer just amplifies everythingthat already exists. But unfortunately, for manyteachers and certainly for many students the com-puter is taken to be transparent. That’s what I’vebeen trying to counteract. The computer is a pres-ence thatmakes itself felt. It’s aplayer in thegame.

SG: The idea of pleasure is what this next ques-tion deals with: Near the very end of The Multilin-gual Subject you address the issue of “pleasure” inlanguage learning and teaching. You wrote that“pleasure is not an expendable luxury, or a randomby-product of the language-learning experience. Itis the crucial experience of the gap between formandmeaning, between signifier and signified that ...is essential to the formation of the multilingual sub-ject.” But you also distinguish “pleasure” from sim-ple “fun.” Can you say how you imagine this work-ing in the day-to-day practice of teaching a foreignlanguage? Why is pleasure so important?

CK: Pleasure has not entered the vocabulary ofSecond Language Acquisition. It is not generally aword you use because most SLA research has nottaken into account the sensuous material aspect oflanguage learning. What people use is generallythe word “motivation.” Motivation is an instru-mental adjective for me, it’s something that movesyou in a certain direction. Pleasure is fundamen-tally linked to your senses, to your perceptions, andto your sense of well-being and happiness. Andthat’s why I like the word pleasure rather than moti-vation. I took Russian with a colleague of mine atMIT, Margaret Freeman, who very much inspiredme when she assigned us to learn a Russian poemby heart. But in order to do that, she went aroundthe room, asking everyone in the room: Whichkind of poetry do you like? I had never been askedthat question. What kind of poetry do I like? Anykind of poetry you would like me to learn. I hadnever been asked about my likes and dislikes. Andshe said, “well, do you like ironic poetry, lyrical po-etry, romantic poetry, modern poetry?” And sheforced me to say what I liked and then she distrib-

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uted poems that each of us liked particularly. I’venever forgotten that because it was the first timethat anybody asked me what I liked. The poem thatI learned by heart was not particularly profound—itwas a Pushkin love poem—but because it was inRussian, it touched me to the core. I fell in love withthat poem even though it was quite a simple poem.Since then, I’ve been assigning in my Germancourses little poems—by Heine “Du bist wie eineBlume so hold und schön und rein” For some na-tive speakers this poem is quite trite. But for alearner, it’s not trite at all. It really corresponds tothe mood of the moment and is able to releaseemotions in the learner that are non-trivial.

SG: Pleasure is the key...CK: Pleasure is the key!

SG: And we are in the middle of talking aboutthe curriculum. What should we teach in the lan-guage classroom? Can you envision The Multilin-gual Subject finding direct application in the cre-ation of curricular materials? What would thesematerials look like? How would you advise lan-guage teachers to make the connection from youranalyses to the design of syllabi and lessons?

CK: I don’t think that The Multilingual Subjectis a blueprint for any kind of new materials and cer-tainly not textbooks. I think the existing textbooksand the existing materials are fine but they require adifferent approach. What I want teachers to do is toput themselves on the line, to acknowledge that theylove a particular poem and that’s why they assignedit or didn’t assign it because when you love a poemtoo much you don’t want to assign it sometimes. I al-ways say: Don’t teach anything that you don’t feelstrongly about, whether you hate it or love it, butdon’t be indifferent to it. Too often, teachers feel thatthey have to be professionals, so that they don’thave to put themselves forward. I am, for instance,for assigning learning poems by heart. Many teach-ers do that already. They sometimes even have thestudents stand up and recite it. But they do it once. Ithink it is worth reciting the same poem severaltimes. Everybody knows that the pleasure of apiece of music, or a poem is hearing it again. Thesecond reading or the second recitation increasesthe pleasure. Ask a student to recite a poem to an-other student, and then this student has to recite itto the next student. Every time you have a differentinterlocutor, it gives you a different pleasure be-cause you get a different response. I also advocategiving students things to reread. They will discoverthings that they haven’t discovered the first time.

SG: There has to be pleasure in the student andpleasure in the teacher.

CK: Exactly.

SG: The next set of questions is rather per-sonal. These questions came to mind when readingthe book. As an individual who is teaching, publish-ing and interacting in an L2 myself on a daily basis, Iempathized with many arguments of L2 speakersquoted in The Multilingual Subject. In addition tothe subjective experiences outlined in your book,my personal experience shows yet another aspectof L2 learning: There are days when I am taken for anative speaker of (American) English. On other oc-casions, I feel unable to hide my German-ness. Itend to say: “I have good days and bad days.”Couldyouelaborateon this subjective impression?

CK: We’ve all been there. It sounds very famil-iar. I wouldn’t say now that I have good days andbad days because I know the thrill of being taken fora native speaker. There is nothing that gives youmore pleasure. And there’s nothing more crushingthan being made to feel you are no longer the na-tive speaker you used to be. For example, I am to-gether with native speakers of French and I realizethat after 50 years in the U.S., I don’t have the exactword or I am missing words in my mother tongue,which is extremely painful. So I know all these feel-ings. But what I catch myself thinking is that myproficiency in the language is very dependent onthe circumstances, and on my interlocutors. A col-league came up to me one day as I had just given aplenary in French and said “I had realized that youwere French the way you speak it, but then tell mesomething: There were plenty of English words inyour speech. Why did you pronounce them theAmerican way?” And I replied: Well, they are Eng-lish words, so I pronounce them in English.” Hethen said: “Well, if you were REAL French, you’dpronounce them the French way.” You can’t win, Ithought to myself.

SG: So there is always ideology involved, aswell?

CK: Oh yes, absolutely, and prejudice againstAmerican English.

SG: In your chapter “The multilingual narra-tor,” – this goes in the same direction – you empha-size, “authors resonated to a theme, a genre, a style[…]” Do themes, genre, and style influence themultilingual subject in different ways?

CK: You’re referring to the chapter where Iwas astonished to see the writings of my students,

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especially Sean and Camila with her telenovela—who sort of relives her telenovela— and thewords she says are basically constructed throughthe telenovela, the soap opera. It gave me the ideathat bilingual people very often replicate a certainstyle or a certain genre that belongs to one cultureor another. It’s not just that they are pronouncingwords or constructing sentences in the two lan-guages. They fit into different text types that comefrom their various languages. It built on some of thework I did on summaries. For instance: I asked stu-dents to write a summary, and I compared the sum-maries written by American students and written byGerman students, what German students call“Zusammenfassung.” A “Zusammenfassung” inhigh school—auf dem Gymnasium—is quite dif-ferent from a “Zusammenfassung” “in derRealschule” and quite different “in der Haupt-schule.” So the genre “Zusammenfassung” is al-ready different in different schools in Germany andagain quite different from French résumé. It was in-teresting for me to see that bilinguals are not onlybilinguals in terms of the vocabulary and grammarbut also in terms of the genres that they’re familiarwith.

SG: How would you explain the fact that whileone is perceived as a native speaker of English inone situation one feels like a beginner when attend-ing a performance of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Nightor when trying to explain to the hairdresser whatexactly he should do?

CK: You are dealing here with two differentkinds of English, two different languages one couldsay, or two different registers, that’s for sure. Forme, this raises the question: what register are yousupposed to teach in the classroom? Are you sup-posed to teach Shakespeare’s register, or the regis-ter that you need to get a haircut at the barber, or akind of a standard national TV anchorperson regis-ter? You’re supposed to teach authentic German,but what is authentic German? When you go toGermany, there are times when it would be appro-priate to code-switch to English. So are you sup-posed to teach them how to code-switch? Theseare interesting questions right now with multilin-gual Europe. What does it mean to teach them thelanguage of Goethe?

SG: One final personal question: My impres-sion is that using two languages equally (as if theywere both my L1) affects the level of proficiency inboth languages (mother tongue and English as L2).Would you confirm this subjective impression and/

or is there an objective explanation? Quote: “Webecome cautious of words” (p. 195).

CK: That is an interesting question and it inter-sects with a larger question: the influence of Englishright now in the world, English as a lingua franca, asa global language. And German, like French, likeItalian, like a lot of European languages, is beinginfluenced, of course, by a pop culture, by rock mu-sic and all these things coming from America; theFrench to a lesser extent than the Germans becausethe French are extremely jealous about their lan-guage. But they will occasionally code-switch andsometimes also use a French that is more anglicizedthan it used to be. There are global genres influenc-ing the various languages, and they are associatedwith English. For example, there is a very attractive– especially for young people – global culture andglobal way of talking, especially on the social net-works, that is slowly influencing the way theseyoung people use their own mother tongue, andthat’s of concern to me.

SG: I feel like we have at least touched upon thenext two questions on language teaching and peda-gogy. In the field of applied linguistics, what ad-vances in our understanding of second-languagelearning should every language teacher be awareof, whether at the primary, secondary, or universitylevel? We’ve already heard it’s all about passionand pleasure. Is there anything you would add tothat? Furthermore, despite your scholarly work,and that of others, arguing for the inseparability oflanguage and culture, in the foreign language class-room culture is still often taught and learned as aseparate topic from language. What advice wouldyou give to language teachers for achieving agreater integration of linguistic and cultural learn-ing in the classroom?

CK: This is a problem that I’ve addressedthroughout my career. Passion of course does havea role in there, but my concern is that languageteachers should not view language as a bunch ofadjectives, nouns, and verbs, but as discourse. Myfirst book was called Discourse Analysis in Lan-guage Teaching. My whole work has been to teachlanguage in discourse, which means language inuse, the sociolinguistic dimension, the pragmaticdimension of language, so that when you startteaching discourse, you can start teaching culturebecause culture is embedded in the discourse, inthe choice of words. Language as choice. If weteach language as choice as early as the first semes-ter German: they have a choice of saying “gutenTag” or “Grüß Gott,” for instance. They have a

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choice of politeness, and of terms that have othermeanings than just their dictionary definitions.When they say “We don’t have time to teach cul-ture” in reality they teach nothing else but culture.Every time they teach a word in a sentence and asentence in an utterance, they’re teaching culturebecause culture is “how do you want to comeacross to an interlocutor.” Do you want to be polite,do you want to be rude, do you want to be ironic?All this is culture. So I don’t understand when theysay, we don’t have time to teach culture, becauseevery single utterance is a speech act and everyspeech act is culturally meaningful.

SG: I like how you used German examples toanswer this question. This is the perfect transition tomy questions on German language teaching. As onopen question: Why study German in our post-9/11 world?

CK: I’ve often thought about that. What I’m go-ing to give you is a very personal answer. There isno reason why an American should learn Germanrather than French, or Italian, or Chinese, exceptfor employment possibilities that are more andmore iffy in the world today. BUT: I’ve ALWAYS feltthat Americans—particularly given their ideology,the history of their country, their universal ambi-tions—could benefit a great deal from learningGerman, and learning the experience of Germans,for instance, in World War II. I find that what Ger-many has gone through was uniquely tragic. An in-credibly sophisticated culture, civilization, and his-tory with a democracy that was only a decade longbut admirable, that managed to get into such aquagmire and such horrible historical events, wasthen divided and grew out of this to become theGermany of today, is a beautiful case study of acautionary tale. An excellent educational systemand a highly intellectual, artistic, and musically in-clined elite are no guarantee against the atrocitieslikely to be commited in times of war and under afascist government and I think Americans can learna great deal from learning German.

SG: A follow-up question to that: We are in anera in which the learning of languages consideredstrategically important to U.S. interests has gainedmore support, both in the popular imagination aswell as in university budgets. Recent MLA statisticsshow continued relative growth in languages suchas Arabic and Chinese, with Spanish enrollmentsalso still far in the lead in numbers of enrollments.At the same time, in the 2009 survey German hadmaintained its overall third position in total univer-

sity enrollments in the U.S. Are you encouraged bythis trend?

CK: Of course. There will always be a numberof American students who are fascinated by thedark history of Germany. But probably it also has todo with the German-Jewish connection and therole played by the U.S. in World War II. But what-ever their reasons for learning German, I’m de-lighted and I wish it continues.

SG: We’ve been talking a lot about cultural im-plications in language learning. In your chapter“Teaching the multilingual subject” you raise thequestion whether critical reflection in the classroomshould be carried out in L1 or L2? Could you elab-orate on your opinion?

CK: The question is always posed as you haveposed it. Should these discussions take place in theL1 OR the L2. But there are many varieties of con-figurations. For instance, in Europe now I give talkswhere I speak in French but I project my slides inEnglish. Or I speak in German and I project myslides in French, which is current practice in Eu-rope. Why can’t the teacher in the German class-room speak in German to keep the monolingualimmersion project going, but then write notes andtranslations in English onto the blackboard? Youdon’t have to hear English in the classroom; it does-n’t break the rhythm. But the teacher can capitalizeon different configurations of English and Germanor other languages that are present in the classroomif the teacher knows these languages. I’m lookingfor ways of making the classroom more multilin-gual in that respect, all the while teaching themstandard national German. But there should bepossibilities. […] I don’t understand why we are notmore flexible. And I think we’ve done disservice tothe profession to eliminate translation. I find thereis good reason to bring back translation, not in thefirst and second semesters, but at the latest in thefourth semester, you can have literary translationsthat illuminate quite a bit and it’s a very useful andbeneficial practice.

SG: The final question brings us back to therhythm and beauty of German. In one of the analy-ses of the subjective experience of L2 learners, youwrite that they tend to perceive German as aharsh-sounding language. In surveys, many Ger-mans perceive certain dialects as ugly (#1: Saxon,which is considered the “ugliest dialect in Ger-man”), while they particularly emphasize the me-lodic, pleasurable sound of dialects such as Kölsch(or Rheinisch, as they tend to call it in Düsseldorf).

GERHARDS: KRAMSCH INTERVIEW 81

Reaffirming this impression, one of our neighbors(a native speaker of English who works as a flight at-tendant) recently claimed that she hated the soundof German. When asked to specify, she explainedthat she frequently flew to Leipzig in Saxony on in-tercontinental flights. What role do dialects play inthe German language classroom?

CK: She did not like the way they speak inLeipzig?

SG: She thought it was horrific.CK: I accept what they say but, in my opinion, it

has nothing to do with the objective sound ofSachsen. Every language can be beautiful. If a na-tive speaker speaks it and it’s one with the person,it’s beautiful or interesting per se. The reason whyshe doesn’t like German maybe is because she as-sociates German with negative memories. Butpeople often hear what they want to hear. Somepeople find that I have a very German accent inEnglish. Why would I have a German accent inEnglish? But they hear Kramsch and they hear theGerman accent.

SG: So it’s preconceptions?CK: I think so, yes. But the question is how

many language varieties should you introduce in

the language classroom. And there is, right now, arenewed interest to bring in different ways of speak-ing German. In fact, at the Berkeley LanguageCenter, next year, we are going to have two fellowswho are going to be looking at Francophone waysof speaking (of speakers from Sénégal or Québec)to see how they can be used in the French languageclassroom. You can’t do that before the secondyear, I suppose. But I think we can acquaint the stu-dents with the wonderful variety of styles and ac-cents – again in the name of pleasure and beauty.We always focus on whether an utterance is infor-mational or clear… how about beautiful? It’s an ad-jective I’d like to see used for German.

SG: Absolutely. Thank you very much for thisinterview.

Works Cited

Bhabha, H. K. (1994). The location of culture. London:Routledge.

Kramsch, C. (1993). Context and culture in language teach-ing. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kramsch, C. (2009). The multilingual subject: What foreignlanguage learners say about their experience and why itmatters. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

82 UP 45.1 (Spring 2012)