CULTURE AS AN EXPERIENCE OF IDENTITY FORMATION IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE LEARNING

Authors

  • Kanavillil Rajagopalan Universidade Estadual de Campinas

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.61358/policromias.v3i2.22198

Keywords:

culture, identity formation, foreign language

Abstract

That language and culture are viscerally tied to one another is irrefutable. By and large, they seem to work in tandem. At least that used to be the case. But currently many argue that the phenomenon of globalization has thrown a spanner in the works. Among other things, it has rendered murky the very identities of individual languages as well as those of the distinct cultures that are supposed to correspond to them (Appadurai, 1990, Higgins, 2011). As forces of transnationalism gather momentum across the world, these identities are slowly being eroded. Hybridity, it seems, is fast turning out to be the order of the day. Nowhere else is this more visible than the case of ‘World English’, a transnational, transcultural reinvention of the language once confined to good old Albion. Acquiring new language skills as part of an effort to become a citizen of the world necessarily implies reinventing oneself. Evidently this is an endless, ongoing task. Who would have thought that poet Tennyson actually prophesied it when he wrote “Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough gleams that untravel'd world whose margin fades forever and forever when I move”! Maybe we have here an apt definition of ‘languaging’.

Author Biography

Kanavillil Rajagopalan, Universidade Estadual de Campinas

Kanavillil Rajagopalan ("Rajan") é Professor Titular (aposentado-colaborador) na área de Semântica e Pragmática das Línguas Naturais da Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP) e pesquisador 1-A do Cnpq. Participa em programas de pós-graduação na Universidade Estadual do Sudoeste da Bahia (UESB) e da Universidade Federal de Tocantins (UFT - Campus de Porto Nacional). Ele nasceu na Índia, onde obteve B.A. em Literatura Inglesa (Universidade de Kerala), M.A. em Literatura Inglesa (Universidade de Delhi) e M.A. em Lingüística (Universidade de Delhi). Fez Diploma em Lingüística Aplicada na Universidade de Edimburgo, Escócia. É Doutor em Lingüística Aplicada (PUC-SP) e Pós-Doutor em Filosofia da Linguagem (Universidade da Califórnia, Berkeley, EUA). Já publicou 6 livros: Por uma Lingüística Crítica (Parábola, 2003), A Lingüística que Nos Faz Falhar (em parceria, Parábola, 2004), Políticas em Linguagem: Perspectivas Identitárias (em parceria, Editora da Mackenzie, 2005) e Applied Linguistics in Latin America (John Benjamins, 2006), Nova Pragmática: Fases e Feições de um Fazer (Parábola, 2010),Um Mapa da Crítica nos Estudos da Linguagem e do Discurso (em parceria, Editora Pontes, 2016) e colaborou com Yves Lacoste na publicação da edição brasileira do livro A Geopolítica do Inglês (Parábola, 2005) e publicou mais de 550 textos (artigos em revistas nacionais e internacionais, resenhas, resumos, capítulos de livros, prefácios, apresentações e textos em anais de congressos). Contribuiu verbetes/capítulos para enciclopédias como Encyclopaedia of Pragmatics (Elsevier, 1998), Encyclopedia of Sociolinguistics (Elsevier, 2001), Handbook of Applied Linguistics (Blackwell, 2003), Fitzroy-Dearborn Encyclopedia of Linguistics (Chicago, 2004), Key Thinkers in Linguistics and the Philosophy of Language (Edinburgh University Press, 2005), Handbook of World Englishes (Blackwell, 2006), Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics (Elsevier, 2006), World Englishes - Critical Concepts in Linguistics (Routledge, 2006), Encyclopedia of Language and Education (Springer, 2008), Key Ideas in Linguistics and the Philosophy of Language (Edinburgh University Press, 2009), Language in Life, A Life in Language -- A Festschrift for Jacob Mey" (Emerald Group, 2009), Language and Politics (Routledge, 2010), Brazil Today: An Encyclopedia of Life in the Republic (Greenwood Press, 2012), Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012,) e The TESOL Encyclopedia of English Language Teaching (Wiley, 2018). Desde 1996, atua como um dos editores da revista DELTA. Em 2015, foi nomeado um dos editores da revista WORD (Nova Iorque) Em dezembro de 2006, recebeu o Prêmio de Reconhecimento Acadêmico "Zeferino Vaz."

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Published

2018-12-28

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Guest authors