View Content #23115

Chantelle Warner is Associate Professor of German and Second Language Acquisition and Teaching at the University of Arizona, where she also co-directs the Center for Educational Resources in Culture, Language and Literacy. Her research crosses the fields of literary and applied linguistic inquiry and focuses on how language is involved in struggles for social and symbolic power and the educational potential of playful, literary language use and creative multilingualism.

Last week poetry was a feature topic on the front page of the New York Times magazine. The article quotes poet Jane Hirschfield, on the social power of the poetic: “When poetry is a backwater it means times are OK. When times are dire, that’s exactly when poetry is needed.” While they might not view poetry as a need, linguists have long argued that the poetic is an essential aspect of language.

For Roman Jakobson, the poetic is one of the six communication functions of language, on par with its referential, emotive, and interpersonal potentials. The poetic function focuses attention on “the palpability of signs” (1960: 356). This capacity of language to make meaning by highlighting how the language is being used is central to not only poetry but also much of advertising and political speech. More recently Karen Risager has included the poetic dimension in her model of languaculture – a term meant to capture the connections between language and culture. Both Jakobson and Risager suggest that the poetic dimensions of language heighten attention to the language itself and thus can contribute to awareness raising, which has been shown to facilitate language learning; but Risager in particular, like the poet Hirschfeld, suggests that the poetic dimensions of language have a social role in that they enable us to explore how our use of language relates to our understanding of the world and the roles and spaces we inhabit within it. In a similar vein, Claire Kramsch has made a case for literature as a source for intercultural discussion around what meanings we value and why (Kramsch & Nolden 1994) and as a means of developing symbolic competence, the capacity to “manipulate” language systems in order to make meaning (Kramsch 2011).

The poetic dimensions of language, those made salient in language use we describe as literary, enable learners to explore not only “new words, but also new worlds” (Kern 2000) in ways that are in line with current discussions of intercultural learning and literacy in foreign language education. With the pedagogical goals of developing more effective interpretive abilities and of fostering more aware and even more playful language use, Carl Blyth, Joanna Luks, and I have developed the project Foreign Languages and the Literary in the Everyday as a collaboration between the Center for Educational Resources in Culture, Language and Literacy (CERCLL) and the Center for Open Educational Resources and Language Learning (COERLL). This project shifts the literary back into the realm of everyday language use from the beginning levels of language learning, by exploiting the poetic potential of a wide range of texts. The project site – fllite.org – features a variety of open educational resources, including sample lessons for and by teachers and video guides for selecting and creating lessons around texts.

Works Cited

Alter, Alexandra. (2017, April 21). American Poets, Refusing to Go Gentle, Rage Against the Right. New York Times, pp. A1.

Jakobson, Roman. (1960) Linguistics and Poetics. In Style in Language, edited by Thomas A. Sebeok, 350–377. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Kern, R. (2000). Literacy and language teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kramsch, C., & Nolden, T. (1994). Redefining literacy in a foreign language. Unterrichtspraxis, 27, 28-35.

Kramsch, Claire. (2011). The symbolic dimensions of the intercultural. Language Teaching 44:3, 354‐367.  

Risager, K. (2006). Language and Culture: Global Flows and Local Complexity. Buffalo: Multilingual Matters.