Using the Concept of Perspective to Integrate Cultural, Communicative, and Form-Focused Language Instruction

Abstract

In 2007, the Modern Language Association Ad Hoc Committee on Foreign Languages advocated for revising postsecondary second language programs to cultivate students’ “translingual and transcultural competence.” Since then, the meaning, merits, and difficulties of these goals have been much discussed. This article presents the concept of linguistic and cultural perspective as a strategy for helping students to develop the interrelated linguistic and cultural competencies at the heart of these goals. Because of its centrality to both language and culture, this concept can link communicative, form‐focused, and cultural instruction and promote the critical awareness that underlies the target competencies. Instructional examples from beginning, intermediate, and advanced German‐language classrooms illustrate how the concept of perspective can be used to pursue these goals.

Understanding and Evaluating L2 Personal Letter Writing: A Systemic Functional Linguistics Analysis of Student Texts in German

“…The task at the center of this study is a fictive personal letter based on the young‐adult novel Damals war es Friedrich (1961) by Hans Peter Richter. Over the years, the book has been used within German secondary school curricula and collegiate FL instruction in the U. S. to promote discussion and develop understanding about German involvement in the Holocaust (see, e.g., Byram, ; Metcalf, ; Moffit, ; Schulz, ). Told from the perspective of a German boy, the novel recounts increasing repression and violence that the narrator's best friend, Friedrich, and Friedrich's family experience as Jews in Nazi Germany.…”

“…The personal letter's characteristic of being maximally invested in reader‐writer dialogue suggests that the genre can provide FL educators with a useful tool for getting students to practice identifying and empathizing with different subject positions. This is an especially relevant goal given increased interest (e.g., Byram, ; Kearney, ; Knutson, ) in creating tasks that invite students to adopt different perspectives and develop deep cultural knowledge in another language. Responding to recent calls in the FL teaching profession to understand better “the ways that students can begin to more fully inhabit other perspectives, to speak through unfamiliar voices, and to view the world through culturally different eyes” (Kearney, , p. 78), this article identifies specific linguistic resources that writers draw on to communicate particular viewpoints in complex letter writing.…”

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

“…Through perspective-taking, though, they can also generate meanings while leveraging the resources of a new languaculture (Agar 1994) and also forging meanings between semiotic systems (intercultural meanings). Byram (2011) similarly views perspective as integral to the development of both translingual and transcultural competences. She likewise recognizes the conceptual load "perspective" can carry, since it can be examined at the level of linguistic form (e.g.…”