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Language, Literature, Culture: The Meaning Making Nexus
Claire Kramsch
Professor of German and Foreign Language Acquisition, University of California Berkeley
Director, Berkeley Language Cener
3:30-5:30 pm
Monday, October 10
1418 Van Hise Hall, 1220 Linden Drive
Download flyer (PDF)
Abstract
This workshop is predicated on the theory that every day conversations, literary texts, and newspaper articles all reveal something about their authors' attitudes and worldviews. Texts, whether they be spoken or written, index stances, identities, values that can be in part attributed to a 'culture', i.e., the memories and subjectivities that people acquire by being socialized into particular speech communities. Through language, people construct, reproduce and transform this culture. But what happens when one learns a foreign language? what culture do foreign language learners construct?
The workshop will explore how culture permeates the whole language learning enterprise and how teachers can best channel this process. After summarizing the same literary text in their own words and from their own perspective, workshop participants will be given tools to analyze and compare their various summaries
and the cultural assumptions underlying each of them. Even though this activity is best carried out at the intermediate level, suggestions will be made on how to apply the underlying principles of 'cultural translation' to beginning levels as well.
Registration not required.
Sponsored by the Language Institute, with funding from the College of Letters and Science Anonymous Fund.
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