Perspective-Taking and Meaning-Making through Engagement with Cultural Narratives: Bringing History to Life in a Foreign Language Classroom

Abstract

The MLA Report (2007) accords considerable weight to the role of culture in a transformed approach to language education in the U.S. and outlines "one possible model" for developing transcultural understanding that involves the interpretation of the "cultural narratives" inherent in all forms of cultural representation (p. 238). How exactly students might be engaged in interpreting cultural narratives in the foreign language classroom, though, remains to be further specified, imagined, practiced, and studied. Moreover, expanding this model of culture-in-language education to include active production and negotiation of meaning around cultural narratives, in addition to interpretation of these, has important pedagogical and learning implications. This paper highlights how engagement with historical narratives is a natural site for the kinds of interpretive and meaning-making practices that foster the deep cultural learning discussed in the MLA's report. Reporting data from an ethnographic, discourse-analytic study of a university-level French classroom, this paper illustrates that through the instructional environment created by the teacher and through the students' engagement in class activities, many rich opportunities for perspective-taking from multiple points of view were made available to students, ultimately weaving a dense web of meanings around French experiences of World War II. Close analysis of excerpts from classroom interaction show how a constellation of instructional features and patterns of student engagement allowed the class to access the repertoire of more or less plausible storylines attached to this historical period and to practice with interpreting perspectives embedded in cultural texts. Interview data further highlight both the challenges and great potential of inviting multiple perspectives and voices into culture pedagogy in the foreign language classroom. 59credence to the MLA's proposed model while also providing evidence for the need to expand that model.Of central concern are also the practical, pedagogical issues arising from such a shift toward engaging foreign language learners (FLLs) with cultural narratives, not least of which is the need to clarify what exactly constitutes a cultural narrative. Building on the MLA report's assertion that cultural narratives "appear in every kind of expressive form" (p. 238), spanning genres and ranging from the linguistic to the visual to any other semiotic mode, I take cultural narratives to be the multiple (sometimes competing), conventionalized storylines that cultural groups produce and use to make sense of and attribute meaning to their shared experiences. These stories employ linguistic and other symbols to signal perspectives and meanings, and whether or not individual members of cultural groups accept particular narratives as reasonable or "true" accounts, they are available to group members for purposes of meaning-making through the semiotic tools they share, especially language.While traditionally in the field of FLE the word "narra...

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