KL: Claire Kramsch: The Future of "Culture" in Applied Linguistics

If Applied Linguistics is “an interdisciplinary field of research and practice dealing with practical problems of language and communication” (Li Wei 2014:2), the study of culture has long been seen an essential component of  Applied Linguistics, if only because the problems created by language in the real world have very often to do with the social, historical and cultural context in which linguistic resources are put to use. That context, that both structures and is structured by language, is what we call “culture”.  Before the advent of globalization, the Internet and the large scale migrations of the 21st century, culture was studied as the national context in which national languages were learned and used. Today, with the increasingly multilingual and multicultural nature of industrialized societies, the spread of English as a global language, and the relentless rise of neoliberal ideology, the notion of “culture” is seen as being less useful in Applied Linguistics than historicity and subjectivity, performativity and symbolic power.

Prof. Claire Kramsch (Professor of German and Education at Berkeley University of California, USA)