Dear all,

With the usual apologies for cross-posting, I'm delighted to invite you to the first University of Edinburgh German Research Seminar of the year on Friday 5 October at 1pm in G.04, 50 George Square.

Our speaker this time is our very own DAAD-Lektorin Julia Feike, who will be speaking on the subject of:

Cultural Learning in Interaction: Researching meaning-making processes in the foreign language classroom

It has been well-established in modern foreign language teaching and research that learning a language consists of more than the acquisition of linguistic structures in a narrow sense as language is always connected to culture. Nevertheless, the question of how to define ‘culture’ and its exact role in studying a new language is one that is highly controversial. The intercultural approach has long served as the leading paradigm to integrate cultural aspects in the design of foreign language curricula, teaching material and the scientific discourse on foreign language teaching. In recent years, however, its underlying essentialist notion of culture has been increasingly challenged by theoretical concepts that highlight discourse and symbolic processes of meaning-making in interaction as the main dimensions when defining culture. Based on this fundamental criticism of the intercultural, this paper will present a qualitative-empirical study that uses videographic data from a German language class to reconstruct meaning-making processes within authentic classroom interaction. Focussing on the symbolic dimension of interaction, the conceptualisation of ‘culture’ and ‘cultural learning’ in the language classroom will be discussed.

We look forward to seeing many of you there!

All the best,

Michael