Rethinking competence for language education in a complex world

The search for notions of competence that take linguistic diversity as a norm and governing principle has yielded a number of concepts that promote ideas that are to some extent already inherent in the aforementioned notion of intercultural speaker (Kramsch, 1998; Byram, 1997). In order to specify how the points addressed in 3.3 have been further developed and become more nuanced, I will briefly outline three oft-cited notions and some of their educational implications: plurilingual and pluricultural competence, translingual/transcultural

The notion of plurilingual and pluricultural competence originated in the work that informed the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) (Council of Europe, 2001) in response to European linguistic and cultural diversity (Coste, Moore, & Zarate, 1997/2009). The CEFR defines plurilingual and pluricultural competence as

the ability to use languages for the purposes of communication and to take part in intercultural interaction, where a person, viewed as a social agent has proficiency, of varying degrees, in several languages and experience of several cultures. This is not seen as the superposition or juxtaposition of distinct competences, but rather as the existence of a complex or even composite competence on which the user may draw. (p. 168)

Clearly revolutionary at the time, this notion relies on a biographically emergent, encompassing view of language repertoires, according to which the individual

does not keep [...] languages and cultures in strictly separated compartments, but rather builds up a communicative competence to which all knowledge and experience of language contribute and in which languages interrelate and interact. In different situations, a person can draw flexibly upon different parts of this competence to achieve effective communication with a particular interlocutor. (CEFR, 2001, p. 4)

Competence is here conceived as “idiosyncratic, involving different personal trajectories, representations and relationships” (Piccardo, 2013, p. 609). “Uneven and changing competence” (CEFR, 2001, p. 133) in different languages are viewed as a normality, and

partial knowledge of a language is, in fact, valued. ‘Partial competences’ are seen as being “in

a dynamic relationship, capable of creating links between linguistic and cultural elements, but also of adapting to situations and interlocutors” (Piccardo, 2013, p. 609). For instance, the concept stresses the potential of speakers to exploit the whole range of their language resources to interpret meanings in any language, including languages that are completely ‘unknown’ to them. Furthermore, it stresses speakers’ potential to mediate and enable mutual understanding across language barriers (see Piccardo, 2018; North & Piccardo, 2016). Importantly, the individual is conceptualized as the locus of cultural and linguistic contact. As elaborated by

Coste and Simon (2009), the individual is seen as a social agent who bears the onus to establish social cohesion in the face of linguistic and cultural differences. Based on the vision of a shared European relationship with languages that is rooted in positive acceptance of diversity, as the authors elaborate, “a social actor’s plurilingualism is vital, not so much in terms of meeting functional needs […] but more essentially in terms of the crucial issue of creating harmonious conditions for living together and exercising democracy in contemporary societies” (p. 169). In sum, the perspective signals “a radical departure from the ideal of native speaker competence in each of the languages” (pp. 173-174), instead promoting adaptability, the embracing of distinct perspectives, and the ability to mediate between views as crucial new targets in language education.

The second concept, translingual/transcultural competence was introduced by the Ad Hoc Committee on Foreign Languages of the Modern Languages Association (MLA, 2007) as the desired goal of foreign language teaching. It places particular value on “the ability to operate between languages” (p. 237) as well as the capacity to mediate between different linguistic and cultural realities. Included in this notion is the ability to connect and contrast familiar and foreign words, constructions, and concepts; to circulate meanings, values, beliefs, and identities across borders, hence making them meaningful in new ways; and to translate categories of thought and defamiliarize seemingly objective constructions of reality (for a detailed discussion of translingual/transcultural competence, see Kramsch, 2011).

Furthermore, symbolic competence was proposed by Kramsch (2006) in order to “resignify the notion of communicative or intercultural competence and place it within [a] multilingual perspective” (Kramsch, 2009, p. 199). Rather than teaching learners how to speak as correctly, fluently, or eloquently as possible within a particular community of practice,

symbolic competence targets the ability to “find appropriate subject positions within and across the languages at hand” (Kramsch, 2009, p. 200). Importance is given to the vision of fostering students’ sensibility for the (existence and power of the) symbolic value/discourses behind words. This includes the ability to grasp cultural memories and emotional resonances evoked by symbols, as well as the capacity to not only interpret familiar events in a new way, but to look both through and at linguistic lenses in order to understand the possibilities and constraints that shape one’s own and other people’s actions within a given environment (Kramsch, 2009, p. 201).

Based on the outline in this chapter, my understanding of multilingual subjectivity can be summarized as follows. Multilingual subjectivity as a conceptual frame theorizes

• language as the practice of meaning-making rather than a structural system • language acquisition, learning, and use as a lived experience

• language repertoires as constantly developing, heteroglossic, complex, affectively charged, and imbued with ideological resonances

• symbolic activity as a process that signifies, creates, and transforms meanings • the relation between language and the self as mutually constitutive

• the self as a subject-in-process, emerging from ongoing discursive positionings in potentially intersecting, deterritorialized, fast-changing, and thus complex spaces • discourses of monolingual normativity such as the native speaker ideal as key points of

reference that are central to the positionality of multilingual subjects

In the next chapter, I use this notion of multilingual subjectivity as a conceptual lens to reframe the phenomenon of HERITAGE LEARNER as I gradually work to open the view on heritage