L2 Journal

In this preface, the General Editors present the special issue, "Multilingual and intercultural perspectives in language learning: Essays in honour of Claire Kramsch," edited by Simon Coffey and Zhu Hua.

Claire Kramsch has a long and distinguished career in the field of applied linguistics. This is not the first and nor will it be the last occasion to honour her contribution to the field of language education and applied linguistics more broadly. Yet we are pleased nonetheless to present this collection of essays which pay tribute to the reach of Claire’s scholarship. Claire has authored many texts that serve as key references in intercultural and multilingual research and has developed several seminal concepts that have guided generations of teachers’ and researchers’ thinking and practice. The aim of this special issue is to celebrate Claire’s influence through the voices of a range of scholars whose professional trajectory she has influenced. As well as being an outstanding scholar, Claire’s personable character and lucid, fresh manner of articulation have won her the admiration and affection of all those who have worked alongside her in different capacities, whether as students, colleagues, co-authors, or collaborators. 

Symbolic Competence (SC) has emerged as one of the key intellectual and critical contributions from Claire Kramsch’s five decades of published research so far, though we scholars and teachers still hesitate at times to apply it in our analyses of practical, multilingual settings. This essay takes the opportunity to reflect personally on the concept, and on how the complex features it illuminates in everyday life have shaped the author’s own formation in various dimensions. The piece takes as its particular inspiration Kramsch’s 2023 “Poetic Equivalence: Key to the Development of Symbolic Competence” as a model for self-reflection, historical contextualization, for its rigorous, fresh understanding of what “symbolic” does and doesn’t mean in everyday, multilingual life, and—to use a Kramschian turn of phrase—for articulating “why it matters.” 

To help language learners navigate the complexities of communication in today’s multilingual world, Kramsch (2009) calls for the development of symbolic competence, a capacity that extends beyond linguistic accuracy and fluency. Symbolic competence enables learners to critically examine how language reflects and reinforces social hierarchies, ideologies, and cultural norms. It also empowers them to negotiate meaning across languages and cultures, while reflecting on how language shapes both their own identities and those of others.

Linguistic Landscapes (LL), the visual and textual representations of language in public spaces, offer a practical and powerful means of fostering symbolic competence. Building on this theoretical foundation, this report presents a classroom project that integrates LL into the Chinese L2 curriculum. It outlines the project’s design and implementation, showcases examples of student analyses, and evaluates learning outcomes. The report demonstrates how incorporating LL into language instruction can bridge classroom learning with real-world contexts, equipping students to engage critically and meaningfully with linguistic and cultural diversity.

The 2007 MLA report offered guidelines and competencies for foreign language majors at American universities in the age of globalization. The notion of translingual and transcultural competence suggests that today’s foreign language education is not merely a matter of language acquisition, but humanistic learning. The ultimate goal for foreign language learners should be to gain alternative ways of seeing the world, namely, “imagining the unimaginable” (Ozick, 1987). This underscores the central importance of empathy in foreign language education. Yet the true challenge lies in how to assess such an abstract concept. Even eighteen years since its initial publication, the report remains highly relevant, especially today, as we witness cultural, ideological, political and socio-economic divisions and the accompanying conflicts rooted in a failure to imagine the perspective of “others.” 

This paper explores a new approach to assessing learners’ transcultural competence, focusing on the role of empathy in understanding the cultural “other.” Discourse analyses of two student final papers were conducted and compared, drawing on poststructuralist theories and a sociolinguistic analytical framework. The results show that one student constructed an imagined Japanese “other” through a process of projection and initiated an empathetic dialogue beyond time and space, whereas the other inadvertently reproduced an Orientalist discourse by negatively stereotyping Japanese people, culture and society. This study advocates for discourse analysis as an effective formative tool for assessing and improving existing syllabi and curricula.  

One strand of Claire Kramsch’s work has been a deep reflection on what it means to be multilingual. Kramsch has argued that being multilingual involves subjective and symbolic dimensions of engagement with languages, cultures and interlocutors that have often been ignored in much language education practice. This article will reflect on the consequences of this thinking for language education and the ways that it has in turn expanded the scope and understanding of language instruction. It will consider what it means to posit the language learner as a multilingual subject living and communicating in and between languages and cultures and negotiating identities, as well as how the teaching and learning of another culturally contextualized language can be designed with reference to the developing multilingual subject.

In recent decades, language education research has broadened its scope to examine personal perceptions of language(s), and different methodological approaches have developed to give voice to these perceptions. Seeing our relationship to language learning as an ever-evolving project of engagement (an autobiographical identity project) helps us to think differently about what motivates people to learn languages. First-person perspectives also highlight cultural patterns in our perceptions of different languages, and how these perceptions are shaped by politics and ideology. One way to challenge the view of languages as fixed or discrete systems is to look at how people use metaphors to describe and understand languages and their learning of them. In this article, I draw on Kramsch’s (2009) concept of the multilingual subject to offer a personal reflection on how my own view of learning has changed, namely from seeing it as a process of individual skill building to understanding learning as something shaped by emotions, relationships, and personal and cultural narratives that unfold over time. This framing of subjectivity encourages us to see “language” as a verb, a form of social practice that is ever shifting and shaping our ways of being in and acting on the world. 

Taking Kramsch’s characterization of language pedagogy (1993, p.12) as its point of departure, this article offers symbolic, poetic and permaculture design principles as an ideologically restorative way of transforming a “little bit of this and a little bit of that” into a holistic, ethical framework which begins from the frameworks established by Indigenous cultivation of the land and codified into permaculture design principles by Holmgren and Mollison (Holmgren, 2017; Mollison, 1988; Whitefield, 2004). In addition, the article offers a view of UNESCO’s Languages Matter: Global Guidance on Multilingual Education, for which I have been a key author and from which the connections to the multilingual and ecological fields have been set. Drawing extensively on project work in the global majority world (aka Global South and Indigenous Peoples as well as those forcibly displaced) and from work with people seeking refuge through languages and arts, the article will demonstrate the enduring power of Kramsch’s tonal style and conceptual traction. As such the article contributes to discussions of multilingual activism and Indigenous reconciliation.

How do researchers in the humanities and social sciences collaborate when each of them belongs to different linguistic, academic, and ideological spaces? This situation highlights those who dare to tread more transgressive paths than suggested by the term 'international collaboration', which is inherently prestigious scientifically. The article pays tribute to the figure of the border passer represented by Claire Kramsch.

While it is generally assumed that research must be disseminated in English, this article sheds light on the underlying theoretical assumptions behind this imperative and critically examines them within a field—didactique des langues in French or applied linguistics in English—that places linguistic plurality at the heart of its inquiry. Drawing on two academic contexts, one rooted in the European, specifically the French, tradition, and the other situated within the Anglophone academic sphere, this article seeks to unpack the processes involved when one consciously works in the “in-between” of languages, making explicit the inevitable gaps or reinterpretations which such work entails.

This paper considers how Claire Kramsch’s work on subjectivity and language learning contributes to a critique of multilingual advocacy, in which linguistics’ efforts of social engagement tend to focus on sites of inequality characterized by structural linguistic difference ideologically attributed to racialized and minoritized communities. While much criticism has been raised against this tendency, this paper argues that Kramsch’s focus on multilingualism as subjective experience not only offers a resource for undoing dominant language ideologies of the discipline, but also provides a concrete alternative basis for the field’s social engagement, via the way it foregrounds the affective, material, and political realities of being a multilingual speaker. Drawing upon recent works in other disciplines that have been actively turning to affect as a way of rethinking hegemonic epistemologies, this paper suggests considering affect as method, which allows our affects, particularly those of discomfort, anxiety, and unease, to guide us in our engagement with injustices, inequalities, and oppressive relations that are deeply embedded within and shaped by our subjectivities.

Building on Kramsch’s body of work on the subjectivity of language, together with her more recent work on the decolonialisation of applied linguistics, this article discusses the implications of challenging the unequal power relationships and coloniality of language (Kramsch et al., 2023). This decolonial approach will be further expanded by drawing on the notion of “linguistic encirclement” (Wa Thiong’o, 1981, 1986), which will highlight the oppression of linguistic and cultural minorities and their knowledges. The discussion on decolonising through language will centre on the positionality of the researcher. Firstly, the notion of ‘the “locus of enunciation” will introduce how the subjectivity of the researcher can be amplified and foregrounded. Secondly, autoethnography will be presented as a methodology of decoloniality that allows the researcher to be congruent with such a decentring approach to language that challenges and restores inequalities of power through multilingual resistance. 

A coda to the special issue.