Teaching and learning French – A tale of desire in the humanities

The body

In other Arts disciplines such as dance, drama and music, the physical space of the class and the body feature strongly. Indeed, work such as that done in staff development by David Heley, demonstrates the power of forum theatre in learning and teaching where you physically occupy different positions, testing out how you respond intuitively and instinctively in a classroom context with the many different layers of verbal and non-verbal happenings. Elizabeth Kelan argues for an ‘embodiment of learning and teaching’ in the western world of HE putting the body at the heart of a learning experience by drawing on Irigaray’s notion of ‘teaching as transmitting experience’ (Irigaray 2005: 58 quoted in Kelan 2011: 39). For Kramsch, the language learning described in second language memoirs such as Kaplan’s French lessons, highlights the embodiment of language learning:

While other classes in the curriculum activate mostly the brain, the language class engages the whole body, its emotions, feelings, desires, and projections […] The acquisition and practice of another language can put one in touch with the deep desires of escape, adventure, and fulfilment that we find in fairytales. (Kramsch, 2009: 210)

This notion of language learning as a form of adventure ties in with the quotation that opens this section about students being ‘excited bodies’. At conferences and in papers in learning and teaching journals, many are searching for precisely this kind of learning, whereby students have the chance to be so excited about their educational journeys.

If indeed teaching is transmitting experience, and we reconfigure our understandings of experience from the viewpoint we are at, which version of ‘experience’ are we transmitting when we teach? When we learn a language and then teach that language, the body is at the heart of what we do and yet as well as transmission of experience, there is also a submission to experience and also to language itself. For, as Kaplan (1993: 128) states, ‘[t]here is nothing cruder, nothing simpler, in terms of pedagogic power, than what goes on in the language classroom’. This power comes in part from the physical and even sensual focus of the language classroom – on the mouth and the tongue. The word ‘cruder’ suggests there is something raw about the experience, as if our bodies are forced to become material to be moulded and shaped.

Unlike first language acquisition, students in the language classroom have to reconfigure their bodies and minds to move towards this new language and make it their own (Kramsch, 2009). This way of thinking about learning and teaching reinforces the physically transformational aspect language learning in the humanities (Epstein, 2012). Kaplan’s description of herself as a student trying to imitate the sounds and accent of the teacher and to reach perfection brings out what she means by ‘power’ in this context. She wants the voice of the teacher. It is not only about the language of the teacher, but the way she/he shapes the sounds to become French. Reading Kaplan, I identified with this ‘pedagogic’ power. This aspect of learning and teaching was not discussed in any of the learning and teaching texts I encountered but it was here in this memoir. It is at once shameful and empowering, which is a paradox but also incredibly motivating in terms of pedagogy and language learning. In a sense, by choosing to embark on a lifetime of learning a language, the student and teacher alike are locked into a battle with a language that knows no end. Phipps and Gonzelez (2004) describe this is in more positive terms as a continuous process of renewal for the student and teacher yet – as the language Kaplan and Huston suggests – there is ambiguity. This risk-taking is undoubtedly part of the adventure to which Kramsch refers.

In her study of a ‘pedagogy of desire’ Jones, argues that this relationship exists throughout university classrooms, that it is not unique to one discipline (Jones, 1996: 102). Her study brings out the way in which students often identify with and want the knowledge and expertise of the teacher. Yet, the powerful transformative aspect of language learning is a more intense desire, described by Kramsch (2009: 15) in the language learning environment as ‘exploring various possibilities of the self in real or imagined encounters with others’. Furthermore, in the language learning class, there is another layer of desire that is not sexual or physical in the way that Jones suggests but is instead a paradoxical, sensual desire that serves also as a motivation but is also about the embodiment, about this submission to an experience that is both uncomfortable and enriching. However, the word ‘crude’ also has quite negative connotations when considered in terms of pedagogy – implying something rudimentary and makeshift, lacking in intellectual subtlety or skill, also comes from Latin crudus: ‘uncooked, bleeding, raw’. There is a hint of violence too, an aspect of language learning that features strongly in Huston’s description of the process as ‘mutilation’ and ‘censorship’. This rudimentary, primal pedagogy in its raw state reminds me of my first experiences of teaching in particular – the fear and excitement and intuitive response.

Submitting to experience

In class, I see submission to the barrier of language, as well as resistance – flashes of defiance that this language will not defeat them. This desire, submission and resistance to the language can be seen as inspiration for learning. What I had learned in the class, my pleasure in being able to master certain sounds and know the meanings of words was exciting. However, this, combined with the experience of being in another country created a desire for that language at almost any cost both to my native language and to my own identity. There was a thrilling excitement of possessing and communicating in another language that was, as Kaplan describes, all-consuming and empowering but that was also about desire, danger, risk – emotions that are beginning to be evoked in academic discourse (Phipps and Gonzalez, 2004).

What is especially powerful about the accounts by Kaplan and Huston though, for me as a language learner and teacher, was their ability to talk about their desire for language. This affective aspect of learning as Kaplan tells her lover, this desire to possess the language of the other is aligned by:

The feeling of power in not being able to communicate, the feeling of being stripped down to the most fundamental communication […] I see black and then flashes: a leg, a sex, a nose. Seen, felt, tasted. The taste of your body pursues me […] like an essence. (1993: 86)

The physical pleasure of submitting to and being inhabited by the other is curiously both reductive and empowering. Kaplan focuses less on the sexual desire and instead emphasises the sensory nature of her experience. In terms of a learning experience, it is precisely about placing the body at the heart of learning although of course we are far beyond the parameters of the walls of a classroom or a lecture theatre. This is in part what makes language learning such a transformative experience – learning takes place across and beyond the curriculum, as Kaplan and also Huston demonstrate. The ‘crudeness’ referred to by Kaplan is seen as ‘mutilation’ by Huston (1999: 22) bringing out the implicit violence of the term. Kaplan defines an essential role for the teacher in which the power games between teacher and learner, native and target language are underwritten with desire and also submission. In these relational power games, knowledge and power can be interchangeable – as subject positions shift and alter (Foucault). The identity of each learner is at stake. Tretheway’s (2004) account of laughter and desire in the classroom draws attention to the power dynamics present in the HE classroom but, as Kaplan and Huston highlight, the shifting identity of the language learner adds a sensuous dimension.

By considering the sensory and emotional experiences of those learning a language in the HE, we begin to understand the relationship each teacher and student has to the language itself. This is rich material to explore that has potential wider implications for those of us thinking about the language of teaching and learning. There is fear, power, desire and a shared experience that can be both uncomfortable and also transformational – to which one must submit with all its pleasure and pain.

Kaplan’s analysis of the different methods of learning and teaching a language leads her to the conclusion that: ‘Whatever the method, only desire can make a student learn a language, desire and necessity’ (1993: 131).

We have explored the way in which desire for language can be described in an affective, emotional way above. Yet, for those who view language as something to acquire, as a skill to add to the university transcript, then this would be the ‘necessity’, as is arguably the case with the growing number of IWLP (UCML-AULC, 2015). The anthropologist Tim Ingold argues that we relate to the world we live in rather than represent it. Ingold enables us not only to articulate the embodying process of language learning examined above but also how we teach. In the context of a modern languages class, we do want our students to represent the target language, but to begin the transformational aspect described, the way they relate to this language also matters. Can we transmit our own learning experiences to help with this process? Or would this admission to our own submission be painful?

Kaplan identifies this relationality in her description of teaching French:

Teaching […] is not really about my French, my body, and whether or not they’re correct. It’s about generating words – other people’s words. Making people change, making them make mistakes, making them care and not care, making them sensitive, but not oversensitive, to the nuances of language. Making them take risks. It is physical, shockingly physical. (1993: 134)

The repetition of the possessive pronoun ‘my’ emphasises the student as the focus here, specifically on the words of the students and their response and attitude to their language. They are in the process of crafting their own language, but it is not words alone; it is much more holistic. In their vision for a way of language teaching, which they view as a process of languaging, Phipps and Gonzalez (2004) highlight the role of risk in the language class, arguing that learning cannot take place without it. The risk opens up the opportunity to explore, to encounter and to meet possibilities. Yet, the problem is if we get back to thinking of language learning as a necessity, there are certain bare-bone skills needed to make communication possible – in that sense it is not only about relation to the language, people and culture but there is also a need to have the words to do so. Here, the student is not so much ‘producer’ as ‘co-producer’ or even ‘reproducer’. (For more on the student as producer see http://studentasproducer.lincoln.ac.uk/.) The desire to make language is relational in the sense that it does not happen in solitary isolation, but in the way it forces the student to communicate with the other on different levels – linguistic, cultural, physically, sensually. This is precisely what makes language learning transformational – cross-contamination and cross-fertilisation is the only way to advance: accumulate the language and begin to possess it.

Moreover, this process is not linear or chronological. Perhaps because of its complexity, student levels and those of teachers too can vary. Indeed Kaplan’s (1993: 136) response to her students and their manipulation of French is enlightening: for ‘[t]eaching, if it succeeds, is dealing with the fact that some of those hams will be better than you are,’. This description of teaching is closely aligned to the idea of the student as co-creator (Bovill et al., 2011), which its advocates argue empower both student and teacher in an engagement with learning.

The ‘pedagogical power’ comes in part from the will of the student to master the language as well as or better than the teacher, who perhaps is in turn is always striving to improve that mastery. Although in theory it is easy to dismiss Francophilia and the need for imitation and perfection of the French language (Hargreaves et al., 2010), Kaplan emphasises how everyone in the language class is very aware of the way their voice sounds in French. Her descriptions imply that as language teachers in HE, our academic identities are at stake every time we give a class in French. This is not only ‘crude’ but verging on the masochistic.

If we go with Kramsch’s analysis of the language classroom for then for Huston, it is more like Little Red Riding Hood with her basket of goodies trying to avoid the wolf on her way through the forest: the French, hyper-protective of their language, are lying in wait ready to pounce on the first error, the slip of the tongue that gives the game away:

On entraperçoit le vrai vous qui recouvrait le masque […] J’ai bien entendu, vous vous êtes trompé? Ah, c’est vous qui êtes un ALIEN! Vous venez d’un autre pays et vous cherchez à nous le cacher, à vous travestir en Français, en francophone … (Huston, 1999: 33)

We spot the real you hiding under the mask […] I heard, you made a mistake? Ah, it’s you the ALIEN! You come from another country and try and then try and hide it from us, dress yourself up as a French person, a francophone … 

The tone of glee at a mistake and indeed the feeling of complete alienation described here will strike a chord with many a French language learner; the fear of being given away, of one’s foreignness being detected? The fear is not so much of mockery, but of being caught out, of not acting like a native. Indeed the ultimate compliment would be for one’s origins to be imperceptible so that a native French speaker would think you were actually French. The tongue in cheek tone of Huston’s writing here is belied by the use of the word ‘travestir’, which reveals an undercurrent of repugnance. Why would an individual want to dress herself up in this way just to pretend to sound French? Huston (1999: 30) describes it as choosing to live’ dans l’imitation, le faire-semblant, le théâtre’. So, for her, it is not only the fairytale but the theatre. It is this possibility of possibilities, of reinvention that Kramsch sketches as the multilingual subject. This (fairy) tale of transformation where language learning is an embodied practice is certainly distant to the acquisition of skills, which is so commonly used to describe language learning. While Kramsch (2009: 4) advocates a new pedagogy for language learning as a ‘lived embodied reality’ and Phipps and Gonzalez give us an exciting glimpse as to what the language learning classroom of the future might look like, Coleman acknowledges that despite keeping up to date with new teaching theories and methods, traditional language degrees in the UK have done little in the way of ‘curriculum innovation’ (Coleman, 2014: 5). So, how can we capture the drama and excitement and even sensuality of language learning embodied by Kaplan and Huston into our language of learning and teaching? Could it be that we need to advocate and openly practice a pedagogy of desire?

Adventures of no return

One of the big risks in language learning in HE is the student placement abroad either in work or study, where the student is forced to abandon, at least in part, their sense of self and submit her/himself to another language and culture. In this context, Huston (1999: 22) dwells on the ‘exile’ involved in the journey into another language, describing it dramatically as ‘[m]utilation. Censure. Culpabilité’. The language here is stark, standing alone without a direct or indirect article. The violence inherent in the ‘mutlilation’ is depicted by Huston in a metaphorical sense. It is her identity which, through contact with another language and culture is somehow betrayed, and so becomes so violently fragmented. For Kaplan, it is only on her return back from French-speaking Switzerland to the states that she becomes aware of change in her body and yet the there is none of the violence described by Huston:

In June I took the plane home. I could feel the French sticking in my throat, the new muscles in my mouth. I had my ear open, on the plane, for the sounds of anyone speaking French because those were my sounds now. I was full of French, it was holding me up, running through me, a voice in my head, a tickle in my ear, likely to be set off at any moment. A counter language. (1993: 70)

French offers Kaplan an alternative discourse, as if her body has undergone a liquid transfusion that enables her to adopt an entirely different subject position (Foucault). For Kaplan, it seems that French has replaced the blood in her body and she has appropriated the sounds and absorbed them to the point where they belong to her. It is no longer possible to separate the French and American selves. Indeed, the level of French coursing through Kaplan’s body represents success for her; she has overcome the linguistic physical obstacles identified in her language classroom:

I didn’t know at the time how important it was to feel that American ‘r’ like a big lump in my throat and to be dissatisfied about it. Feeling the lump was the first step, the pre-requisite to getting rid of it.

(1993: 54)

The emphasis by Kaplan on this ‘r’ as some kind of ‘lump’ creates the impression that she is physically blocked from speaking fluent ‘proper’ French because of the sounds of her native language. This description also implies that language is physical; an object to be removed that can somehow be disassociated from the speaker. This depiction illustrates precisely the risk that language learning brings – you have to change your body to reach that transformation, it is indeed ‘shockingly physical’. Yet, there is also a self-awareness described by Kaplan that I strongly identify with. By learning a language, I became hyper-aware of my body and the sounds it made not only in French but in my native language. There is also a feeling of pride and achievement in having mastered those ‘sounds’ that now belong to her and a need to connect to others like her. This description indicates that the French language has possessed the very core, the essence, of our narrator and yet by doing so, it has enabled her to flash a mirror on her own language.

As a language learner myself, I remember vividly that initial immersion in French – when you start dreaming in the language and begin to lose the prepositions in your native tongue. This linguistic invasion is at once exhilarating, exhausting and bewildering. And yet it is this same experience we know our students will undergo in their own rite of passage to another country. This form of ‘signature ‘pedagogy’ (Shulman, 1995) that is an apprenticeship every Modern Languages Academic has also undergone in some form or another. However, like a well-kept secret it is not something we discuss with our students as they go off, often unsuspecting, on their year abroad. We supply our students with the ‘building blocks’ (Meyer and Land, 2005) that will move them further towards the target language and culture but the magical shift towards fluency, the ‘threshold concept’ (Meyer and Land, 2005) is what they have to find in themselves: an awakening of desire perhaps. For Kaplan, the ‘threshold concept’ is physically embodied by the French ‘r’ that remains an obstacle in her throat. Her desire to rid herself of this obstacle is a goal in her learning. Her joy when she masters it is orgasmic: a jouissance. Through the open process of languaging, which enables students to engage with the learning, to be creative and to be the ‘excited bodies’ mentioned at the beginning of the article, Phipps and Gonzalez propose a way of teaching that can open up students to what they can experience in their time abroad, where the uncertainty is embraced. Their vision is an appealing one, but from my analyses of Huston and Kaplan, and from my own reflections, there is also something appealing about the sensual, physical aspect of language learning. Yes, it is an embodied practice that is fluid and mobile, but we also need to acknowledge the brutality for there is no gentle initiation into another language or culture as you are suddenly ‘unbuttoned’ (Kaplan) and even mutilated (Huston).

Of course one of the tools that enable us to move between languages, especially when we are learning a language is the dictionary. The title of Huston’s text,‘Perdre le nord’, can mean to lose one’s bearings, no longer know where you are or what you are saying and this mismatching of meaning illustrates the way in which languages do not relate to one another with precision nor exactitude. Huston draws attention to the way in which dictionaries do not always provide us with an exact translation; the meaning is almost wilfully rendered opaque:

les dictionnaires nous induisent en confusion, nous jettent dans l’effrayant magma de l’entre-deux-langues, là où les mots ne veulent pas dire, là où ils refusent de dire, là où ils commencent à dire une chose et finissent par en dire une tout autre. (Huston, 1999: 13)

Dictionaries lead us astray, throwing us into the terrifying magma of being in-between two languages in the very place where words don’t mean anything, or refuse to say, where they start meaning one thing and end up saying something completely different.

The suggestion that dictionaries deliberately mislead and confuse us underlines the impossibility of language learning as a complete skill in and of itself, finite like the passé composé. Instead, like the imperfect tense, and exactly like Ingold’s ‘enskilment’, it is continuous and ongoing.

Her description of the ‘in-between-ness’ of language learning pinpoints to what extent an individual will never fully and completely inhabit this other language. The image of this nomad land as a ‘terrifying magma’ makes it appear like purgatory. Like Dante’s journey into hell then, this journey into another language marks a departure from a native language where meaning is not questioned into a target language where ambivalence reigns. The meanings of word elude us and cannot be matched to their original, as if they are slipping and sliding away from some kind of concrete definition which means not so much that we forget what we wanted to say but rather we cannot say what we want to say. Is language learning in fact a process of becoming mute? This form of mutation is of course Huston playing with words themselves. Words are not living objects that control and resist us but her point is clear: moving into another language is disorienting and forces one to move away from concrete ground into a place that is much less solid and possibly even treacherous. We need to reset the compass. If we cannot translate ourselves, we are indeed ‘lost in translation’ (Hoffman, 1998) and our very sense of self is threatened. Huston’s deliberate use of ‘nous’ here is perhaps the one element of optimism; we are not alone in this journey into another language. It is perhaps the universal experience of every language learner to become an orienteer, to lose the way at one point or another, to take risks and submit to the experience of being other. For there is every possibility that just as Huston describes above, I start meaning one thing but end up saying another. For Huston, this space ‘in-between’ languages is terrifying. But what if being led astray like this, un-knowingly, could take us somewhere rather productive? Could this transformational possibility in language learning enable us to reflect on how and what we teach?