Beyond binary thinking: exploring language and culture in world languages education

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we draw on data from world languages teachers (English, Spanish and French, in particular) to explore and unpack binaries encountered in their practice in relation to both culture and language. Specifically, we explore the fluid and the fixed, and the essential and the hybrid, within the classroom and world beyond. We theorise language and culture through the frame of the assemblage, drawing on Deleuze and Guattari, to problematise the binaries which world languages educators engage as part of their practice.

En este artículo nos basamos en datos de profesores de idiomas globales (inglés, español y francés, específicamente) para explorar y desglosar las dicotomías encontradas en su práctica en relación tanto a la cultura como al lenguaje. En particular, exploramos las nociones de ‘lo fluido y lo fijo’, y ‘lo esencial y lo híbrido’, en las dinámicas de salón de clase y el mundo más allá. Teorizamos el lenguaje y la cultura a través del concepto de assemblage (ensamblaje), basándonos en la obra de Deleuze y Guattari, para problematizar dichas dicotomías en las que los educadores de lenguas participan habitualmente mediante su práctica.

KEYWORDS:

• Culture
• language
• assemblage
• language education
• world languages

Introduction

Culture is a consistently elusive, multifaceted, and ever-present dimension of language education. An extensive range of terminology and approaches is found in the academic literature exploring the role of culture in the teaching and learning of languages. However, as Muirhead (2009) argues, the lack of a common framework regarding culture can be regarded as problematic, as it potentially obscures the complexities of culture (p. 243). Culture has been discussed – critically and pragmatically – in relation to target language using communities, learners’ home cultures and languages, communicative and symbolic competence (Kramsch, 2006), global and local cultures, languaculture (Risager, 2005), interculturality (Liddicoat, 2008), critical pedagogy and conscientisation (Muirhead, 2009), nationalism and language ideology (Blommaert, 1996), as well as notions of microcultures and cultural identities (Holliday, 2010), and multiculturalism and hybridity (Kubota, 2014). In previous work, we have ourselves explored whether it is possible to delink language from culture and vice versa, or whether the ways we use and understand language are themselves instantiations of culture (see Demuro & Gurney, 2018). This argument draws from discussions of language ideology, monolingualism and monoglossia, which have led to the problematisation of language-as-code and to the reframing of linguistic practices as languaging, and later translanguaging and metrolingualism (Becker, 1991; Lewis et al., 2012; Li, 2018; Pennycook & Otsuji, 2019).

Here we again explore the notion of a language as a cultural construct (Makoni & Pennycook, 2006), examining whether we can capture the shape and form of languages, and to what extent these are interpellated by cultural practices. To address these concerns, this article explores language and culture in relation to languages education through the grounded and situated standpoints of world languages (WL) educators. We draw on data gathered through semi-structured interviews with tertiary-level teachers of French, English and Spanish, to explore what they think about – how they frame and negotiate – the complex relationship between language and culture in their teaching. Each of these languages has an intricate, contested, and long-ranging socio-political history as a so-called ‘world language’. Indisputably, a plethora of target language-using communities and associated cultural practices, situated around the world, are associated with each of these world languages, eluding easy classification. The notion that languages such as English, Spanish, and French are singular, uniform entities is increasingly difficult to entertain. The assertion that each is a discrete language is debatable: there are many different Frenches, Spanishes and Englishes, which manifest across as well as within national borders; some are officially recognised varieties, while others are not. These languages also have extensive overlapping histories which intertwine them together.

The idea of linguistic plurality under the guise of Englishes, Spanishes and Frenches reflects the diversity of speakers, communities, and practices that have evolved under the shifting landscapes of globalisation, nation building, and imperialism (Train, 2007, p. 208), as well as the many small cultures that have always existed within broader social orderings such as nations (Holliday, 2010). Variations are not merely peripheral, but instead represent an intricate network of practices (what may be referred to as dialects, sociolects, and idiolects), each with their own unique characteristics, norms, and semantic nuances.

However, notions of authenticity, legitimacy, and authority abound in relation to who uses which languages and how. A salient example is the concept of the ‘native speaker’, grounded within the monolithic idea of Native Standard Language. Train (2007) explores this in depth in relation to Spanish, discussing how would-be ‘real Spanish’ – that is, a mode of the language that is valued as authentic and legitimate – is only thinkable through a constellation of ideological forces which give potency to the notion of a language (in singular) as being fixed in time and space, and subsequently against which all language practices can be evaluated and assessed (Train, 2007).¹ Similar discussions have been undertaken elsewhere, particularly in relation to English as a global language and a lingua franca, where the concept of the native speaker is critically engaged (Canagarajah, 2007; Lowe, 2020; Seidlhofer, 2005).

The existence of Englishes, Spanishes, and Frenches underscores the fluidity and dynamism of language practices, reflecting a myriad of cultural, historical, and socio-political influences. It challenges the notion of language as a static, codified system, and instead frames it as a dynamic, evolving tapestry of human communication, shaped and reshaped by the language users themselves. Language is, therefore, not a singular but a plural phenomenon, deeply intertwined with the specific contexts and communities in which it is used.

As will be discussed in what follows, the experiences of the teacher participants in this study are mapped against this linguistic and socio-political complexity. This prompts us to question how, for instance, language educators grapple with so-called ‘real’ (standardised, native, official) language, as opposed to the various language practices encountered within and beyond formal education contexts? How do they negotiate cultural practices when they are distributed beyond target language ‘using’ or ‘owning’ communities? How are notions of legitimacy and authenticity balanced within the realities of language in use, embedded within heterogeneous cultural practices?

We find the assemblage (Deleuze & Guattari, 1984, 1987) insightful for exploring how participants negotiate binaries related to language and culture in their teaching. We explore the fluid and the fixed, and the essential and the hybrid, within the classroom and world beyond. We do not dismiss, reify, or propose an alternative to these binaries – rather, our aim is to understand how they are experienced, contested and reproduced within the conditions of the participants’ work, letting go of the idea that they manifest in the same ways across situations. The assemblage allows us to view the participants’ experiences as created through multiplicities, rather than binaries, which may shift in shape.

The study: materials and methods

The study involved semi-structured interviews with fourteen language teachers and researchers based in Australia and New Zealand. Invitations to participate were extended via email to those who taught languages at the tertiary level – that is, within universities and polytechnic colleges. This included teachers of languages other than English, as well as English as an additional language. Potential participants were identified through publicly accessible professional pages in online staff directories as well as through snowball sampling via professional networks. Research experience was not a criterion for participation; however, most participants were also academic researchers or postgraduate research students in applied linguistics, modern languages, education, or literary and cultural studies. It is important to note that several participants in the study taught languages not normally considered to be ‘world languages’ (WL); however, due to the focus of this particular paper, only data relating to WL have been included here.

Each participant completed an individual semi-structured interview with one of the researchers. Interviews were conducted either in person or via video conferencing, averaging 60 min in length. The interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim for analysis.²

Interview questions were organised around four core themes: language, communication, culture, and pedagogy. Each theme contained several sub-questions, some of which related to the theme in general (for instance, ‘how does communication relate to language?’), while others focused specifically on language teaching (such as, ‘how should our practice respond to the goal of teaching learners to communicate in the target language?). Participants were emailed copies of the questions before the day of the interview and had time to think through responses as desired. All themes were discussed with all participants; however, as the interviews were semi-structured, the order progressed organically and was slightly different for each, depending on the participants’ own responses and interests.

Interview data were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2019, 2021). For this paper, we approached the data to explore participants’ experiences and understandings of language and culture specifically. Our decision to analyse the transcripts with these concepts in mind was informed by contemporary discussions of languages education globally, with many researchers and practitioners demonstrating significant interest in how language/s and culture/s are taught, framed, reproduced in curricula and materials, and assessed through assessment regimes. On familiarising ourselves with the interview transcripts, it became apparent that many of the participants were concerned with these same issues, and the notions of fluidity and fixity in relation to language and culture – whether referred to in those terms or using synonyms – were prominent in their responses. These framings emerged from our reading of the data and allow us to explore – and challenge – binary thinking in relation to language teachers’ own understandings and practices. This is an exploratory qualitative study, and we aimed to understand the data set as a whole, rather than treating the participants as individual cases. As such, as have woven together data from the participants in presenting and discussing our findings.

Findings

We present and discuss the findings below in two sections. The first addresses language, while the second focusses on culture. While the boundaries between language and culture were at times blurred by participants, we found enough distinction in the data to present them as two interrelated yet separate sections. The section on language frames the data through the binary of the fluid and fixed. The section on culture is organised around cultural essentialism and the idea of hybrid cultures. We provide definitions of the fluid and the fixed, and the essential and the hybrid, in the sections that follow. Both sections contain excerpts of data from the participants’ interviews, and all participants are referred to with pseudonyms.

Making and remaking language

Fluidity and fixity are very relevant concepts in language studies. Questions of how language changes, and how it remains the same, are of as much concern to theorising about what language is as they are to teaching it. A framework that captures both the mutability and endurance of language seems necessary to understand how language functions.

Connell and Gibson (2003) provide a framing in their discussion of ‘fluidity and fixity’ in relation to music. We draw on their work to map out parallels to how we might think about language and linguistic practices. Connell and Gibson (2003) argue that music is both fixed and made fluid through material and discursive processes. These include, for fluidity: migration, capital flows, mass markets, technological diffusion, cultural flows, and hybridity. For fixity, the authors identify markers of insularity, fixed production infrastructure, tradition, and cultural resistance.

Similar arguments have been made in relation to fixing languages at points in time – through artefacts such as grammars and dictionaries – and how this rubs up against practices that unfix language, either unintentionally or deliberately. These are not new discussions; indeed, the work of Bakhtin (1981) is well regarded as establishing discussion of how ‘correct’ language is set against a backdrop of heteroglossia:

[e]very concrete utterance of a speaking subject serves as a point where centrifugal as well as centripetal forces are brought to bear […] Every utterance participates in the ‘unitary language’ (in its centripetal forces and tendencies) and at the same time partakes of social and historical heteroglossia (the centrifugal, stratifying forces). (p. 272)

In more recent times, the significant authority that is invested in the existence of separate language codes – or, named and enumerable languages – has also been interrogated through the fluid-fixed framing. The work of Connell and Gibson (2003), for example, is taken up by Otsuji and Pennycook (2010) through their lens of metrolingualism. They write:

[m]etrolingualism describes the ways in which people of different and mixed backgrounds use, play with and negotiate identities through language; it does not assume connections between language, culture, ethnicity, nationality or geography, but rather seeks to explore how such relations are produced, resisted, defied or rearranged; its focus is not on language systems but on languages as emergent from contexts of interaction. (Otsuji & Pennycook, 2010, p. 246)

Turning to our data, although there were different approaches to understanding fluidity and fixity described by the participants, a common thread was the need to move beyond an either/or approach; in other words, participants saw benefits in presenting to students both fixed and fluid practices. Sandrine, a French teacher, commented on the need to teach students how to understand and use both standard as well as non-standard linguistic forms. She saw this as empowering to students, clarifying that too strong an emphasis on either approach is problematic. Sandrine stated:

[u]ltimately, you do want your students to be able to speak and write, to the norm, to a kind of standard […] if you bring in too much of the variability to it, I do bring it, but even myself, when I use French, I use a form of standard French, and then I’m aware of all the other ones. And sometimes in my writing, I can use non-standard French forms from a reason – it’s, you know, I really see that as a language and cultural educator, you teach the standard, and then you teach about language. […] I want my students to be able to understand the dirty joke, or the graffiti, and also to be able to read Sartre, ultimately, or whoever, you know, in final, and know the difference, that’s power to the students.

However, Sandrine reported encountering resistance to her approach amongst colleagues, particularly when it came to actually teaching non-standard forms as part of the curriculum, rather than just teaching students about them:

Some of my colleagues were, got really very upset, because, you know, I was not just saying that. I was doing it. I was teaching different registers of French, including slang, I was teaching the whole range. And that’s, that was teaching about language. So I was saying, look, this is the standard register, then we have the very formal, and we have the slang, and they are all important. And I even said to them, you know, very skilled politicians, they know how to use language, because they want to talk to the elite and to the people, and they want to, you know, spread the power that way.

Similarly, Teresa, a teacher of Spanish, evoked the fluid and the fixed binary through the metaphors of dissecting an organism and conducting a geological study. She described languages as alive, ever-changing, and dynamic. However, she also argued that this fluidity could be fixed or frozen at particular points in time. This has parallels with the notion of fixing a dynamic landscape as immobile, discussed by Connell and Gibson (2003), in which it is neither one nor the other, but simultaneously both. Teresa explained that:

[…] strictly speaking about verbal languages, written languages um, to me they are like organisms, I mean they are not fixed. They are not fixed codes; they are alive, they are changing, they are dynamic. So, in a couple of generations you will see that there is a change in certain expressions. So, the etymology of words tells you the origin, as you the perception of people back then centuries ago, so how the world changed through time and the meanings, maybe the same word but different meanings. So that tells you that it’s like an organism, alive … Evolving through the people, so um, so it’s a medium, but it’s also a medium that is dynamic, it’s changing. You can dissect it … chronologically or geographically or by gender. But still you are talking about something that changes. It’s like when you are studying geology, different layers, different geological eras; with words, with languages, you can do the same when you go back in time.

Similar experiences were recounted by John, an English teacher with experience teaching in different contexts around the world. John grappled with the simultaneous co-existence of Englishes and standard English. He reconciled the realities of Englishes-in-flux, particularly as they are spoken, with retaining ‘a notion of standard written English’ which he saw as offering a foundation for teaching:

[t]he notion of Englishes is interesting because there’ve always been Englishes, there hasn’t been an English. However, over the last 40 years, there’s been far too much emphasis, in my opinion, on spoken language. And, of course, Englishes are most varied in their spoken form. And I think it’s possible to retain a notion of standard written English. And standard written English does comprise basic, common elements of grammatical structure. And by grammar, I don’t only mean syntax, but all the grammar, phonology, the grammar of discourse, as we now know, we’re exploring, even as we explore further, grammars of pragmatics. So I believe fundamentally, yes, the grammatical structure of a language, of English, and for that matter, the other languages that I claim to know, should be the foundation of teaching.

Participant Amanda, who had taught English and Spanish, discussed language beyond standard and non-standard forms, as something that exceeds ‘linguistics and grammar and written and oral communication’. She commented on technologies as constitutive of new forms of language and referred to emojis as a case in point. She discussed the challenge of incorporating these into her teaching, as well as the necessity of doing so:

[t]here are so many things technology is doing that are shaping language, you know, whether it be emojis, or just the different software that we’re using to communicate, I think we need to start accepting how those are part of language now. Because if we ignore them, I mean, that has implications for what happens in the classroom. So, language for me, it is a really broad thing. I don’t know, I’m probably, maybe too broad. But yeah, it’s more than linguistics and grammar and written and oral communication.

Amanda also saw the environment of the classroom as something which needs to be connected to the world beyond:

[…] even the other day, I was chatting with a student who, he speaks Mandarin, and he was saying it’s so annoying that group over there, they kept speaking Mandarin during the lesson, it really bothers me. And yeah, we were just really having a talk about the fact that well, we do have lots of languages in our class, and you shouldn’t be uncomfortable with hearing other languages. That’s part of the globalized world that we will, you know, are kind of living in between at the moment. And it’s okay. So, I guess encouraging students to use all different languages.

A significant point of discussion amongst the participants, as evidenced above, concerned the relationship between coded, standardised languages and language-in-practice (or rather, languaging). Rather than prioritising abstracted language codes, languaging centres practice as the key to understanding and framing communication (see Maturana & Varela, 1987). Becker (1991) argues that language only exists as ‘continual languaging, an activity of human beings in the world' (p. 2). The participants used different examples to allude to this, including slang, technologies, written and spoken language, and etymology of words and expressions; fundamentally, what is evident is the tension between catching and freezing language in a specific form – which, under current circumstances, is much less difficult and controversial to teach – and acknowledging the constructedness of this form as an object of teaching and learning. As various participants stated, there is a pragmatic need for students to understand this too.

While standardised forms are typically the objects of instruction and assessment in language education, they are not necessarily the reality that students encounter when using the language beyond (and even within) contexts of formal education. Subsequently, there is tension between what is taught and assessed and what is encountered – heard, read, spoken, written and otherwise – by students. This tension is mirrored in the discussion of essentialism and hybridity, related to cultural practices and depictions, below. It is important to note, moreover, that there is also a clear connection between language and culture in how participants viewed the fluid and the fixed.

Culture within and across contexts

Participants agreed that language educators should aim to include ‘cultural elements’ in their teaching. This was seen as an important task in the preparation of students for real-life interactions, and to assist students to navigate communication in their developing language(s) beyond the structures of language per se.

However, defining what culture is, and identifying appropriate lenses through which to approach cultural practices, were challenges that all participants articulated and grappled with. In much the same way discussions have evolved in relation to the use of language (singular) and languages (plural), Verschueren (2008) argues that it is useful ‘to view culture in terms of continuity and change’ (p. 26), further adding that, while ‘[t]here are cultural differences and contrasts […] these do not amount to clusters of features that are identifiable, let alone separable, coherent entities’ (emphasis in original, p. 26).

Participants discussed tensions encountered with regards to cultural essentialism, problematising whether it is in fact possible to teach students about cultural practices without subscribing to incomplete and stereotyped views of target language using communities. Grillo (2003) defines cultural essentialism as ‘a system of belief grounded in a conception of human beings as “cultural” (and under certain conditions territorial and national) subjects, i.e. bearers of a culture, located within a boundaried world, which defines them and differentiates them from others’ (emphasis in original, p. 158). While Grillo (2003) notes a move away from this understanding in academic circles (his discussion particularly concerns anthropology), he argues that popular thought beyond the academy often continues promotes essentialised views of culture.³

Similarly, the data show participants shared a need to move beyond a culturally essentialist depiction of target language using groups, and even to move away from a Eurocentric or Global Northern vantage point.⁴ For example, Alessandro, a teacher of French, commented:

[a]rriving at [my institution], I noticed that the curriculum that I teach is very Eurocentric […] And I’ve been trying to expand on that a little bit so that students are aware of the fact that the French language is present on all continents in the world. It’s taught, it’s the main language taught around the world after English, for example. That it has historical and practical relevance, even here in New Zealand/Aotearoa; if you look at our Francophone neighbours, for example, New Caledonia is a country with whom we share an underwater continent. French Polynesia isn’t that far away, Vanuatu as well. The French arriving in New Zealand and practically becoming a French South Island in 1838. So to answer your question a bit more specifically, it’s time to make French relevant both locally and globally, and negotiating kind of those, those tensions there.

Alessandro acknowledged that negotiating these tensions involved normalising hybridity in his teaching, rather than treating it as a marked alternative to essentialist views: ‘I think showing them that a certain amount of hybridity can become normal, in fact, opens them up to a better understanding of how languages travel, how they evolve, where they are spoken’. This is a significant point. Alessandro argues for a conception of language and culture which is able to transcend the essentialism and hybridity binary, arguing that the hybrid is in fact constitutive of culture. As he highlighted, this has both ‘historical and practical relevance’, even for a context as far away from the Francophone centre as New Zealand.

John and Min, both English teachers, also discussed the teaching of culture from pragmatic and critical points of view. They discussed their experiences teaching aspects of identified source culture – John referred to cultural representations in textbooks and Min to teaching idioms – which their students had found difficult to understand. These are grounded examples of notions of cultural essentialism, and teachers’ negotiation of them, in teaching.

In John’s case, he chose to move away from teaching about ‘English culture’, as he realised it had no meaning for the students. Rather than avoiding culture altogether, John reframed his teaching away from ‘source culture’ and instead encouraged students to engage with their own experiences of culture in English. Interestingly, students’ culture was also unpacked in layers (village, town, region, and so on), avoiding a rigid or simplistic engagement. As John reflected:

[w]hen we were in Oman […] before we knew it, we were talking about source culture. […] But we realised that the children from 10-year-olds through to 18-year-olds, um, couldn’t really talk about English culture. So, we taught them how to talk about their culture in English. And we started off by my village, my town, in my region, i.e. the Middle East, the world, that was the sort of structure, the ecological structure of the book.

Min reflected on similar experiences when teaching English language idioms to students in Malaysia. Without sufficient context to understand them, Min found the idioms she was required to teach difficult to understand. Min commented that her attempts to teach these did not ‘make sense’ or even ‘feel right’:

[y]ou know, we teach them proverbs, we teach them idioms, but personally it’s getting students to memorise without understanding the true essence or meaning behind those proverbs. Like, um, for example, the idiom ‘until the cow comes home'. It’s like, what? I know what it means. It can go on for forever and ever and ever. But what does that essentially mean? Until, you know, I had a farm stay, and I started observing the cows because that’s all you could do in a farm. And that’s, I think that’s when it truly hit me that, ah, until the cow comes home – because they don’t budge. They practically stay in a spot, and that’s their spot. So, oh, then it makes sense. That’s their culture. That’s the English culture, but in Malaysia, in my context, in the jungle with that culture, it didn’t make sense! I think back then, I did question, but not consciously, but you know, it’s just a feeling that this didn’t feel right.

Although the participants were resistant to supporting essentialist views of culture, there are obvious traces of essentialism in the above excerpts. Indeed, the data show how, empirically, the notion of a culture, as a bounded entity, carries significant weight. Both John and Min were expected to teach culturally-inflected content as part of their curricula. While both felt uncomfortable about the expectation to teach through or about a particular ‘source culture’, they also reflected ideas of cultural essentialism in their comments – for instance, both John and Min talked about the ‘English culture’, and how this differed from cultures in Oman and Malaysia, the subtext being that all of these exist in some way. John’s allusion to introducing content ‘before we knew it’ speaks to the salience of these aspects of language teaching, even for the global language of English.

Sandrine, who teaches French, acknowledged these complexities, and countered them by emphasising the importance of not bypassing essentialised culture altogether. She saw it as imbued with a significant amount of power, and therefore important for students to understand:

I’m very aware of all the debates on that, sure, you know, like, you don’t want to teach from an essentialist perspective, all right. But when you teach, you need a starting point. So, and I think we’ve got to be very careful with this. So, I do teach French culture, but I try to deconstruct all the stereotypes as I go, but also make the point that they are often alive in people, those stereotypes, you know, and people use, essentially, expression of culture for political reason. So you know, you can see that with the rise of the right wing, extreme right. Well, now they’ve become mainstream in France, in terms of a symbolic culture […] So you bring in a critical perspective on history and on mainstream French culture.

Sandrine’s acknowledgement that stereotypes are often alive in people as expressions of culture is an instantiation of their place within assemblages of language education and language use. Sandrine’s comments shift away from the need to define culture in a singular way, instead placing culture into physical and political practices; within some of these practices, stereotypes and fixed expressions of culture are very real.

Sandrine went on to state that ‘for the purpose of teaching language and culture at tertiary level, I find it useful to think in terms of the micro connection between language and culture versus the macro’. This resonates with the findings of Holliday (2010), who found that vast concepts such as nation can be important and powerful sources of identity; however, these concepts work ‘in a variety of ways in resistance or dialogue’ (p. 169) with personal cultural realities, which are layered and shifting.

Participant Michaela weighed in on these tensions as a teacher of English. Like Sandrine, she saw neither position – hybridity or essentialism – as entirely satisfying on its own. Rather, it was important for language teachers to understand the existence and influence of both:

I think there’s a really strong idea in the world that if people can learn to speak a more dominant language such as English, obviously then that’s going to free them, or they’ll become more socially free. For example, they can actually have more jobs, they can more easily move to other countries and maybe just generally become more aware of concepts outside their own awareness dictated by the language.

But again, like I said before, I think we have to be really careful when we talk about or like that because it kind of sounds quite imperialist, and that just saying English frees people from the bonds of their language and their culture, maybe to some extent is practically true and I’m a practical person so I understand that, but I’m also not entirely comfortable with it.

This excerpt also underscores the intersection of language, culture, and power dynamics in the context of the globalisation of English. Michaela acknowledged the instrumental value of English, a lingua franca, in offering greater economic and social opportunities and expanded knowledge to individuals. Yet, she also highlighted the dangers of this viewpoint, particularly its potentially imperialist implications; the notion that English can ‘free’ individuals from their linguistic and cultural constraints suggests a hierarchy in which English, and by extension Western culture, is superior. Further, this perspective risks erasing linguistic diversity, devaluing non-dominant languages, and undermining cultural identities. Michaela’s discomfort reflects a tension between the practical benefits of English language proficiency and the ethical considerations of how the language intersects with the other languages and cultural viewpoints of learners.

Discussion: approaches to the study of language and culture

Within the scope of this paper, the data suggest that the WL educators conceptualised languages and cultures in relation to fixity and fluidity, and essentialism and hybridity, in the contexts of the classroom and the world beyond. A key concept which emerged through the discussions with the participants is that of the binary. A binary is, in essence, two concepts which sit in contradistinction to one another: one is defined as what the other is not. Binaries are by no means unique to modernity, and yet they are often discussed within its boundaries (no doubt given the prevalence, power, and un-markedness of modernity).⁵ Furthermore, it must be noted that the languages we discuss in this paper are colonial, imperial languages, which are now ‘world’ languages because of their intimate historical relationship with modernity and European colonial expansion. In other words, their dominance as world languages has been historically determined by processes of conquest and colonisation.

Within the Western canon, binaries have been associated with dualist thought stemming from the work of Rene Descartes, who crystallised the separation of mind from body with the infamous assertion cogito ergo sum.⁶ Other salient binaries often examined in the humanities include nature and culture, masculine and feminine, emotion and reason, and self and other (to name a few). Binaries habitually organise hierarchies: one side of the binary is inherently more valuable under certain ideological regimes than others. We are particularly interested in how this materialises in languages education, as the field is strongly influenced by ideas about correct or incorrect language use, legitimacy, authenticity, and ownership. For example, returning to Train’s (2007) discussion of ‘real Spanish’ through binary thinking, we might assume there is a corresponding and opposite ‘un-real’ or ‘in-authentic’ Spanish. The purpose of discussing these binaries is not to dismiss them entirely, assert that each part does not exist, or propose an alternative but, rather, to explore them and their implications in languages education.

Participants’ accounts of language and culture both recognise and problematise the fixed and fluid, essential and hybrid binaries. At times, sometimes intentionally and also perhaps inadvertently, they also reified them. There is therefore a dilemma in relation to how to theorise these binaries: they both exist and do not exist, depending on how and when they are encountered, negated, and/or reified within the assemblages of each participants’ practice.

What is clear, however, is the participants’ awareness that practices are always invested with meaning, within and beyond the classroom. The participants’ concerns in grappling with these matters are both critical and pragmatic. They discussed, for instance, the problematisation of essentialist or nationalist ideas about language and culture within the academic literature, but they are also expected to negotiate the alternatives within broader social systems which may have little regard for (or even active aversion to) critical scholarship. Participants recognised that the conditions under which they navigate and teach language and culture are pre-determined before they set foot in classrooms and are sometimes rigidly fixed. This led participant Min, for example, to jokingly state that, ‘I’ll say that ironically, I teach standard English’, as a reflection on constraints on her practice in an exam-oriented system.

The existence of the discussed binaries – fixed-fluid, hybrid-essentialised – speaks to the multiplicity of forces which interpellate educators to teach language and culture in specific ways. The strong desire within certain parts of the academy to move beyond ideas of fixity and essentialisation is countered by the existence of practices and ideologies which continue to fix language and essentialise culture in the ‘real’ world. Zhou (2022) alludes, precisely, to ‘a failure of connectivity between intellectual developments and the real world problems these developments set out to cure’ (p. 295),⁷ which arguably we can see here.

Essentialist views of culture and cultural groupings are also persistent in language teaching curricula and materials, caught up in the ‘packaging’ of language education as a marketable and desirable product used to attract potential students to study. Favoretto and Hortiguera (2018) explore this in relation to materials used in Spanish language teaching. They examine the reliance on exoticised and touristic depictions of culture associated with the Spanish language. They make the following observation about audio-visual materials used in Spanish classes:

Es llamativo, en este sentido, ver parte del material audiovisual norteamericano y español que acompaña siempre a estos textos y que exhibimos en clase sin cuestionarlo: gente que baila en las calles, que participa de desfiles o de festivales de comida, que transita por parques y plazas, pero pocas veces que trabaja y produce conocimiento. La preferencia exótica va acompañada casi siempre de una atracción por ciertos contenidos, a expensas de otros. […] Para muchos vídeos de estos libros, internarse en los mundos hispanos, su lengua y su cultura es adentrarse en las exóticas tribus de Pandora, aquel mundo mítico que describiera James Cameron en su film Avatar (2009). (p. 11)

[It is striking to see some of the North American and Spanish audio-visual material that accompanies the texts, that we show in class without question: people dance in the street, take part in parades and food festivals, meander through parks and plazas, but are rarely presented as workers or knowledge producers. This preference for the exotic nearly always comes with certain content, at the expense of other content […] In many of the videos that accompany textbooks, becoming immersed in the Hispanic world, its language and culture is akin to entering the exotic tribes of Pandora, the mythical world of James Cameron’s film Avatar. (2009)]

Favoretto and Hortiguera (2018) state that such materials position students as cultural flâneurs, and provide a superficial, touristic and exoticised engagement with cultural practices. The authors argue that such materials also singularise so-called Hispanic culture, anchor it within a particular time period, interlinked with folklore and subalternity, and ‘museify’ it. While these examples are connected to Spanish, the participants’ comments in our study suggest that this is an experience shared by other languages educators. As Alessandro commented, although French ‘is present on all continents in the world’, curricula rarely reflect this.

Other participants saw stereotypes as important to acknowledge, albeit for very different reasons than providing an authentic lens onto culture and identity. Sandrine’s comments are an apt example of this; she reflected ‘I try to deconstruct all the stereotypes as I go, but also make the point that they are often alive in people, those stereotypes, you know, and people use, essentially, expression of culture for political reason’. Overall, the reflections of our participant group suggest that WL educators may both reify and resist cultural essentialism and stereotypes, and put forward potentially innovative and resourceful conceptions of what culture is and what it is not.

To think through, around and between these binaries, we propose using a poststructuralist approach to language and culture. In particular, we draw on the lens of the assemblage, as delineated by Deleuze and Guattari (see Colebrook et al., 2002; DeLanda, 2016; Deleuze & Guattari, 1987).⁸ Interest in the assemblage within the field of language studies has become particularly pronounced in recent years, with a range of theoretical discussions being mobilised around the parameters of language-as-assemblage (often drawing on other authors within new materialist research, such as Karen Barad) and exploring how it can be studied empirically (see Sharma, 2023).

The notion of language-as-assemblage, also referred to as the semiotic assemblage, emphasises the range of actants and components that come together to make meaning (see for example Gurney & Demuro, 2022, 2023; Pennycook, 2017; Pennycook & Otsuji, 2017). We have previously defined language-as-assemblage as follows (and wish to adhere to this definition here):

[t]he assemblage perspective fosters a materially-informed, dynamic view of language as social and cultural practice; it allows us to acknowledge the role of ideology in these practices, and the agency of actants to shape, reform, or reproduce the language assemblage. Matter participates in the assemblage, as bodies, sound, marks on a page; however, these elements shift, separate and re-converge, and are not interpreted in the same way across assemblages. (Gurney & Demuro, 2022, p. 317)

This definition allows us to apprehend language as a socio-cultural and material practice that is dynamic, as well as influenced (in variable ways) by persistent forces such as ideologies and the physical contexts and practices of languaging. To draw on Deleuzian terminology, assemblages de- and re-territorialise in response to the coming together of such forces: that is, they may deviate from established patterns or reinforce these (Deleuze & Guattari, 1984; Fox & Alldred, 2013). The term ‘assemblage’ is a translation of the French agencement, which speaks to the productivity of assemblages as heterogeneous sets of forces and actants that come together to channel affect in particular ways, rather than a collection of inert things.

The concept of the assemblage provides a fertile analytical lens through which these tensions can be theorised. As we have argued elsewhere, through the assemblage, language ‘is not a finished product – a completed thing, object, or determined set of practices – but rather a confluence of practices, ideas and artifacts caught at particular times and places’ (emphasis added, Gurney & Demuro, 2023, pp. 135–136). Further, as Deleuze and Guattari (1987) state:

[…] the abstract machine of language is not universal, or even general, but singular; it is not actual, but virtual-real; it has, not invariable or obligatory rules, but optional rules that ceaselessly vary with the variation itself, as in a game in which each move changes the rules. (p. 100)

If we approach conceptual binaries as components within assemblages, we are able to explore scenarios in which an apparent or conceptual binary may not be so neatly delineated in practice. Our purpose here is not to dissolve difference, turning binaries into unities, or to propose a third alternative, nor is it to replace them with heterogeneity and erase all association, but rather: to explore the potential of differences – related to experiences and practices of culture – in a non-oppositional or dualistic way.

This also opens up the discussion to a range of possibilities, including for instance the ways in which assemblages can be intentionally re- and deterritorialised – i.e. to observe existing binaries or look beyond these. Any discussion of criticality in languages education surely needs to consider both the material and ideological realities of classrooms as well as the aspirations and desires of teachers and learners. These could be approached with a frame that allows us to see beyond an oppositional or dualistic logic, in which options are not presented as either one or the other.

Conclusion

There is considerable complexity involved in providing a definitive account of culture within the realm of language education. Culture, in its very essence, is a dynamic, multifaceted entity, intricately woven by a broad array of historical, socio-political, and individual factors. It permeates all aspects of human existence, from macro-level societal norms and values to the micro-level nuances of everyday interactions. To encapsulate culture within a single, rigid definition would inevitably lead to an oversimplification. Similar comments can be made about language, which is arguably subject to even less scrutiny than culture in languages education.

At the onset of this article, we asked whether it is possible to capture the shape and form of languages, and the extent to which these are interpellated by cultural practices. The intersection of culture with language presents a multidimensional interplay, where both influence and are influenced by each other. In the context of language education, the attempt to define culture can only ever acknowledge these complexities and reinstate the fluid relationship that exists between them. Subsequently, while language educators may acknowledge difference amongst and coexistence of language varieties, recognise hybridity, and conceive languages as fluctuating practices, it is also important to understand why language and culture can be fixed in place, what contributes to this fixing, and the implications it has for how we understand, use, and teach language. We see the assemblage as a sensible and effective analytical tool to perceive the sometimes-contradictory relations between the ideas, practices and materials that come together to create and sustain languages education. It also allows for critical engagement with the ways in which change can be fostered or prevented.

In conclusion, it is important to engage critically with the notions of fixity and essentialism, not only to problematise them, but to recognise how they are intertwined within assemblages of language and culture. That is, while they are not, on their own, comprehensive depictions of language or culture, they do exert significant influence over how individuals practice both language and culture – how they ‘create’ and mobilise them – and therefore should be understood as constitutive components of these. As various participants also argued, it can be beneficial for students to explicitly understand the power that essentialised and fixed notions of language and culture carry, as both language and culture are formed through the interface of material and ideological components. Just as Tange and Jenks (2023) reflect in the introduction to their recent special issue in this journal, on nationalism and interculturality, we wonder about the dangers of the field ‘collectively overlooking’ persistent fixities – whether they are arguably benign or not – in a quest to see only the fluid.

Acknowledgements

We express our gratitude to those who have contributed to the realisation of this project. We extend a special note of appreciation to the participants of our study. Their generous investment of time and their invaluable reflections on language, culture, and languages education have enriched our understanding in multiple ways. We are profoundly thankful for their contributions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by University of Waikato.

Notes on contributors

Laura Gurney

Laura Gurney is Senior Lecturer in Te Kura Toi Tangata School of Education, University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand. Her areas of specialisation include languages education and the theorisation of languages/languaging.

Eugenia Demuro

Eugenia Demuro is Director (RSA Campus) at Research Strategies Australia. She has extensive experience in teaching and research across languages, Latin American studies, literary studies, and sociology, at various universities in Australia. Her current research explores ontology and languages/languaging.

Notes

1 Train writes: ‘[o]n the one hand, an identifiably real Spanish language seems fixed in communicative, social, and textual space. On the other hand, Spanish as a world language is a dynamically complex set of language and culture practices involving hundreds of millions of people in very real local and global contexts that have been successively shaped by the changing contours of colonialism, imperialism, and globalization’ (Emphasis added, p. 208).

2 Ethics approval for the research was provided by Deakin University’s Faculty of Arts & Education Human Ethics Advisory Group (HAE-20-039).

3 Although this paper was published some 20 years ago, it is not unreasonable to make the same observations today.

4 These are often considered to be unmarked positions for languages educators teaching English, Spanish and French, given the histories and current distributions of the languages; however, as the participants point out, the long reach of the languages (historically and geographically) makes maintaining this position rather untenable.

5 For a critical discussion of modernity (and its darker side, coloniality) see Castro-Gómez (2008), Dussel (2002), Quijano (2000).

6 Rene Descartes’ separation of the mind-body dualism is a key organising structure in western thought and has left a significant trace.

7 Zhou (2022) proposes Buddhism as a lens through which to view these tensions: ‘Communication and interaction would be viewed as fleeting moments that form part of a stream of events, which arise and cease in some relation to (but not determined by) each other. […] While Buddhists would see culture, identity, and communication as empty and impermanent, they would simultaneously accept that these phenomena are real in our empirical experience and may have an enduring feature in concrete contexts. This is not a naïve compromise made between competing ontologies, but is rather a considered position for balancing different levels of theory, a position known as the Two-Truths doctrine’ (p. 299).

8 Invigorated interest in the work of these authors has arisen through the new materialisms and posthumanities, but the impact of Deleuze and Guattari’s work and use of the assemblage as a theoretical apparatus predates these bodies of work.