“The word, at first, is a conventional substitute for the gesture”.
(Vygotsky in Verity 2000, 204)
“A child counts with his fingers before he counts ‘in his head’; he feels love on his skin before he feels it ‘in his heart’. Not only ideas, but emotions too, are cultural artifacts in man.” (Geertz 1973, 81)
Language or culture would not be conceivable without symbolically mediated minds.
Minds are made, meanings constructed and language learned in concrete interactions with social and physical environments through mediation and internalization. This is, in a nutshell, what the sociocultural theory (3.2.) claims. Geertz (1973, 36) considers that instead of trying to draw a troublesome line between what is natural, universal and constant in man (‘nature’) and what is conventional, local and variable (‘culture’) we should conceive man not only stratigraphically (and separating in parts) but synthetically, as relations between biological, psychological, social and cultural factors of human life.
He gives cardinal importance to the cultural level - culture as semiotic meaning-making activity - which is the only one distinctive to the human being. (Ibid 37 - 38). Both the interpretive anthropological and the sociocultural view have been replicated in much of the recent FLT. It seems to me, though, that what is often overlooked is that according to both visions meaning-making is an activity deeply rooted in our living bodies, which - in this aesthetically focussed semiotic framework - is a synonym of the mind. It is also the phenomenological (Husserl 1859 - 1938) conviction that meaning emerges from a person’s engagement with the world, through “perception-in-action” (van Lier cited in Kramsch 2002, 9) which is necessarily a ‘bodily’ event. Ultimately, or in the first place, the world is perceived and mediated through the body (Marcel Merleauponty 1908 -1961, Phenomenology of Perception 1945, 1962inKramsch 2002, 10 - 11).
Many of the recent proposals such as interactionalism, collaborative or cooperative learning, dialogism, critical language pedagogy and post-method thinking all promote - for slightly different reasons and in different terminologies - the idea of education and language education as humanizing, transformative or potentially liberating activities. I would gladly subscribe to a good part of their agendas, but I believe there is still more in the play, though perhaps in more subtle and less grandiose terms. I think that we should not study languages ignoring their affective resonances in the bodies of speakers and
hearers. The anthropological and sociocultural theories of meaning and mind prompt viewing the process of learning foreign languages as semiotic, historically and culturally grounded personal experience that brings about subjective responses in the speakers:
perceptions, emotions, memories, fantasies, desires, projections, identifications, physical sensations. There are numerous accounts (e.g. first person narratives in Pavlenko and Lantolf 2000) that show how central these experiences are to the language-learning process. Kramsch (2009a, 246) considers the “multilingual learners’ heightened awareness of the embodied nature of language” to be an important future issue for investigation together with the emotions associated with the use of different languages, dialects or registers. Often the process of becoming multilingual also implies having to cope with sensations of loss of power and of emotional bafflement (Pavlenko and Lantolf 2000, 160-163) for which the FLT context should, in my opinion, find a channel of expression. Kramsch (2009a, 5) as well as Pavlenko and Lantolf (2000, 159-160) coincide in that with the current theoretical paradigms of the SLA research these phenomena are difficult to grasp. If FL teaching and SLA research continues focusing only on the communicative and informative value of language, the symbolic aspects or emotional effects together with the bodily dimension of foreign language learning is overlooked. An aesthetic approach to FLT could highlight the value of learning languages as vivid and bodily meaning making processes; not only codes. When culture is understood as the making of the minds, language can no longer be taken as a given, a code that students need to learn, but “rather as a major aspect of the cultural domain in which our lives are constructed and reconstructed” (Pennycook 1997, 49).
Van Lier (2000, 246) is among those who have criticized the reductionist view that
“learning takes place in the brain” by information processing, as if we were computers.
In The Meaning of the Body (2007), M. Johnson comments how the most central of the searches in all humanistic fields of study – namely, the search for the construction of
‘meaning’ - so often takes an abstract conceptual and propositional structure. He is referring to contemporary philosophy, but I would extend this claim to the field of language education as well. I agree with Johnson that we commonly come across with quite “eviscerated” views of mind, thought, and language (Johnson, M. 2007, x). In Johnson’s opinion, the explicit separation of the mind from the body which is so all-pervasive in Western philosophy and lay thinking (about Descartes’ Error by Damasio 1994 in Kramsch 2009, 66; Johnson M. 2007, 4) has caused a cultural misunderstanding
of, and consequent prejudice against, aesthetics. He claims that aesthetics should not be too narrowly construed as the study of art and so-called aesthetic experience: it is the study of the human capacity to make and experience meaning (Johnson M. 2007, x-xi).
Johnson (ibid.) deems that if the arts are misconceived as a minor, nonpractical, wholly subjective dimension of human life, aesthetics becomes merely a decorative element with little perceived relevance to the nature of mind and cognition. Among he most serious misconceptions Johnson lists the view of the mind as disembodied; the conviction that thinking transcends feeling; the denial of feelings as part of meaning and knowledge; the belief that aesthetics concerns matters of subjective taste; and the contemplation of the arts as a luxury rather than a condition of full human flourishing. It is important to notice that in an embodied view of meaning-making the ‘aesthetic’ and the ‘bodily’ spheres go always hand in hand. They are totally intertwined: the heart of the notion consists of a unified mind and body.
Furthermore, it is vital we revalued rhythm and pace in the field of language education, where teachers and learners alike are all too used to hurrying to the next point, often urged by institutional pressures and competitiveness. Body is truly ‘ecological’, ‘situated’
and ‘context sensitive’: it responds to the environment, be it of social, cultural or physical nature. The time of the ‘body’ is different from the swiftness that we habitually demand of the ‘mind’: it is more conservative, needs maturation and appreciates repetition and rituals. “The body likes to re-member, re-thread, re-cognize” (Kramsch 2009a, 202-203).
A FLT that brings the aesthetic sphere to the foreground would foster a more ‘bodily’
conception of time: it would promote cycles of understanding to gain more depth, play with variations and allow time for finding different meanings. Spending time on detail produces a more memorable and more enriching learning experience in the long run. It is, also, a basic given of Steiner education. An aesthetic approach to FLT appeals to the subtle pleasure - always a bodily experience - that learners find in making meaning (Barthes 1975 in Kramsch 2009a, 208) which Kramsch describes as “perceived match between form and content, between what you wanted to say and how you said it, between a word and the resonances it has for you” (ibid.). As is also argued by M. Johnson (2007, x-xi), the aesthetic sphere is neither a luxury nor a random by-product: it is the crucial experience of building a bridge between form and meaning. For that reason, approaches to foreign language teaching that underline the importance of the aesthetic and bodily sphere should not be dismissed as mere flights of the imagination or leisurely pauses in
the middle of the more ‘serious’ classroom work. Language learning engages learners cognitively, emotionally, culturally and aesthetically, thus not only involving ‘mind’ as traditionally undertood, as a disembodied entity. It is my conviction that the symbolic uses of language are deeply embodied, and can be turned palpable through the ancient and, at the same time, ever – renewing cultural resources of ritual, myth and art to help language learners lay bridges between forms and meanings.