Yale Language Series EDITED BY PETER C. PATRIKIS Reading Between the Lines PERSPECTIVES ON FOREIGN LANGUAGE LITERACY Yale University Press New Haven & London Copyright ∫ 2003 by Yale University. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Publisher: Mary Jane Peluso Editorial Assistant: Emily Saglimbeni Manuscript Editor: Jane Zanichkowsky Production Editor: Margaret Otzel Marketing Coordinator: Tim Shea Production Coordinator: Joyce Ippolito Set in Minion type by Keystone Typesetting, Inc. Printed in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Reading between the lines : perspectives on foreign language literacy / edited by Peter C. Patrikis. p. cm. — (Yale language series) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-300-09781-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Language and languages—Study and teaching. 2. Literacy—Study and teaching. I. Patrikis, Peter Charles. II. Series. P53.475 .R43 2003 418%.0071—dc21 2002033171 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. 10987654321 . et femina dux erat To Claire Kramsch for leading the way Contents Preface ix Introduction Peter C. Patrikis 1 1 Reading Cultures and Education William A. Johnson 9 2 Literacy and Cognition Mark Turner 24 3 Literacy as a New Organizing Principle for Foreign Language Education Richard G. Kern 40 4 Playing Games with Literacy: The Poetic Function in the Era of Communicative Language Teaching Carl Blyth 60 5 Reading Between the Cultural Lines Gilberte Furstenberg 74 vii viii Contents 6 Reading and Technology in Less Commonly Taught Languages and Cultures Masako Ueda Fidler 99 7 Experiential Learning and Collaborative Reading: Literacy in the Space of Virtual Encounters Silke von der Emde and Je√rey Schneider 118 8 Double-Booked: Translation, Simultaneity, and Duplicity in the Foreign Literature Classroom Mark Webber 144 9 Ethics, Politics, and Advocacy in the Foreign Language Classroom Nicolas Shumway 159 List of Contributors 169 Index 173 Preface The essays in this volume were originally presented at two conferences conducted by the Consortium for Language Teaching and Learning: one on technology, foreign languages, and undergraduate education held at the Mas- sachusetts Institute of Technology in October 1998, the other on new perspec- tives on foreign language literacy held at Brown University in October 2000. That these essays, all of which have been extensively revised, are gathered in one volume is not mere serendipity: the chapters share a renewed emphasis on reading in the teaching and learning of foreign languages. I am grateful to the contributors for their willingness to include their essays here and for their patience on the long road from conference to book. And I am grateful to the readers of the earlier draft of the collection: Mary Ann MacDonald Carolan of Fairfield University, David Goldberg of the As- sociation of Departments of Foreign Languages, and especially James S. Noblitt of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, whose guidance, wit, common sense, wisdom, generosity, and friendship I treasure. Finally, I would like to express my thanks to the Andrew W. Mellon Foun- dation and the C. V. Starr Foundation for their generous and enlightened support of the Consortium’s conferences. ix Introduction peter c. patrikis Only in the stream of thought and life do words have meaning. —Ludwig Wittgenstein It is then that the reader asks that crucial question, ‘‘What’s it all about?’’ But the what ‘‘it’’ is, is not the actual text . but the text the reader has constructed under its sway. —Jerome Bruner Between the lines . The titular metaphor of this book has an admit- tedly Zen-like or postmodern character. It suggests presence by absence, meaning where nothing is written, a third or higher dimension hidden from the view of those who inhabit Flatland. At the same time, it is a simple and common metaphor that a≈rms that every text is more than the sum of its parts, that every text means more than the linear assembly of its individual words, their dictionary definitions, their morphology or structure, and their syntactic relations with other words. A text does more than realize linguistic code in context. It also refers back to other texts, what Henry Widdowson, borrowing a term from literary theory, has called ‘‘intertextuality’’ (Wid- dowson 1992). An invitation to a wedding, a memorandum announcing a sta√ meeting, a letter of complaint about a defective purchase—such texts, 1 2 Peter C. Patrikis and they are of course innumerable, embody social and cultural norms, and those norms are actualized with reference to previous texts. Citation, allu- sion, patterns of rhetorical organization, and genre protocols assume routine and predictable forms. We do not speak and write with complete originality. When we speak and write, we place ourselves in a textual tradition of expec- tation and authorization. We play with that tradition (we should recall that the Latin root of the word allude means ‘‘to play’’), but we do not violate it. Such violation might be ignorance of the rules. It might be idiocy (the Greek root of that word—idiot—suggests a private language). Or it might be lyric poetry, when we consider the examples of Mallarmé, a Celan, or one of the Surrealists. In other words, language learning has not only a social and cul- tural dimension but also a historical dimension. A text must reach into the past in order to be comprehensible, as I have discussed in an essay on culture and language teaching (Patrikis 2000). Every teacher of language will recognize in the metaphor of reading be- tween the lines the primordial di≈culty of every student: to move beyond token-for-token processing to analysis and the understanding of the multiple meanings of a text, to progress from mere decoding to rich interpretation. And every teacher will recognize that trivial texts are not e√ective in guiding students to higher levels of reading. The neglect of serious reading—by which I mean reading that does more than hunt for facts, that is more than referential, that provokes questions, that awakens the judgment and imagination—took hold in the heyday of the oral proficiency movement with its reaction against the supposedly rebarba- tive practices of the grammar translation movement and with its putatively pragmatic approach to oral communication in reaction against the limita- tions of the AudioLingual Method. Signs in train stations and weather re- ports passed for significant texts, readily decipherable by the novice learner. Poetry was largely consigned to the dustbin, as Carl Blyth notes in his chapter with regard to a poem by Jacques Prévert. Similarly, the perplexities of cross- cultural encounters evaporated in the bland give-and-take of question and answer in short interviews. The widespread demise of serious reading re- flected the baby-with-the-bathwater mentality that often appears to char- acterize what is seen as progress in the teaching and learning of foreign languages. What takes place within the field of foreign languages mirrors what takes place in the wider economic, political, and social culture, as two major retrospective surveys have demonstrated (Kramsch and Kramsch 2000; Lan- tolf and Sunderman 2001). For many years now, and with increasing fre- quency, we have come across repeated announcements of the death of read- Introduction 3 ing (for example, Highfield 2000; Johnson 1995): television, computer games, Web surfing, and almost any other form of entertainment have been invari- ably invoked and condemned as lethal to the life of the mind and inimical to the permanence of the written word. (These arguments follow in the lineage of Plato’s criticism of poetry.) No one has argued the case more ardently and more elegantly than the distinguished and eccentric literary critic Harold Bloom. In an interview published in the Yale Bulletin and Calendar (2000) following the publication of his book How to Read and Why, Bloom la- mented, ‘‘The real enemy [of reading] now is the screen. Whether it’s the TV screen or the motion picture screen or most likely, in the end, the computer screen. The real enemy is the Internet.’’ A similar sentiment issues from Esther Dyson, computer guru and member of President Clinton’s advisory board on the National Information Infrastructure. In her book Release 2.0 Dyson frets about whether the world of multimedia is undermining the reading of texts (Dyson 1997). If in the past we were accustomed to debating the relation of orality and literacy, we now seem to have shifted the terms of the argument to literacy and multimedia. In his essay William A. Johnson traces the evolution of the distinction. In sharp contradistinction to Bloom’s apocalyptic pronouncement about literacy, many foreign language classes and many of the essays in this volume testify to a renewed interest in reading, which is in fact promoted and not diminished by the World Wide Web. Anecdotes and examples abound. In a presentation to a group of visiting language teachers Andrée Grandjean-Levy of Cornell University discussed an intermediate French course that was based almost exclusively