Volume 15.1

German in Transit

The Migrant Mindset

TRANSIT vol. 15, no. 1

by Claire Kramsch

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Introduction

I like to think that the grammar-translation method, through which I started learning German in German-occupied France in 1943, prepared me to later marry a German, leave my country, and migrate to the United States. Born French to a French father and a British-Jewish mother, whose parents had themselves emigrated from Hungary and Poland to England at the turn of the century, I never doubted that translation meant migration—both the thrill of escape from the limits of one language and the anxieties of migrating into another. When after the war I studied to become a teacher of German in France, it seemed natural that I too would at some point emigrate and continue to live in another language—in transit, so to speak, as my mother and my grandmother had done.

I made my life in the United States and taught German to American students, but even though I acquired U.S. nationality, I remained physically and emotionally a “migrant” between nationalities, languages and cultures: teaching German through a didactic training acquired in France, speaking French with my children and German with my husband, regularly travelling between the U.S. and Europe, and contributing to the international research field of Applied Linguistics in English. I thus use “migration” both in its literal and metaphorical sense to refer to the crossing of borders of all kinds.

When I came to the U.S. in 1963, I wondered why American college students would decide to learn German. It was not, as in my case, because it was the language of the enemy. It seemed to be because of a German ancestry or a fascination with German history, a love of German literature or perhaps simply because teachers of German had a good reputation for conducting fun and interactive classes. Some wished to go to Munich to communicate their way through a German city, a notion that grew in appeal through the 1970s, as the communicative approach to language teaching made them eager to emulate the native speaker’s fluency and interactive ability.

In the last 30 years, however, the monolingual native speaker in foreign language pedagogy has largely lost its attraction as a target model. With the spread of English as a global language, and with the increase in the number of international multilingual students on US campuses, it has been replaced by the bi- and multilingual subject, equally at ease in German, English and other languages.[1] Research in second language acquisition and applied linguistics has moved from studying the monolingual foreign language learner to studying the bi- or multilingual cosmopolitan speaker, code-switching between German, English, and other languages, the global citizen of the world, the decolonized and translingual activist par excellence, and the AI-savvy internaut.[2] This has become the (idealistic) target that much of recent research in applied linguistics seems to offer learners of a language other than their own. Becoming multilingual is certainly an ideal that communication on social media and Google Translate seem to facilitate. But is it a goal that all learners identify with? And more importantly is it a pedagogic goal that German language teachers have been trained to teach to?

This paper seeks to explore what it really means for foreign language learners to adopt a multilingual mindset, i.e., to speak, write and think in more than one language, and to learn German “multilingually.” I have called this mindset “migrant,” because this way of thinking about the learning of a foreign language entails the crossing of boundaries: linguistic, cultural, epistemic, disciplinary, literary, communicative. These crossings have been theorized in various ways in the field of Applied Linguistics and its German equivalent Fremdsprachenforschung. In the following I consider each one in turn.

Linguistic migration: Translanguaging as a practical theory of language

From its initial use in Welsh-English bilingual education in Wales (Lewis et al., 2012), the concept of translanguaging was adopted by Ofelia García (2009), who used the bilingualism of Spanish-speaking students in bilingual programs in California to validate their home language and their identity as bilinguals, and to help them learn English.[3] It was then expanded by García and Li Wei (2014) and Li Wei (2018) whose translanguaging theory includes all bilingual or incipient bilinguals learning foreign languages in institutional settings.[4] This theory is avowedly based on Cummins’ psycholinguistic theory of the crosslinguistic interdependence of bilinguals based on a common underlying proficiency in two languages.[5] According to this theory, bilinguals are not two monolinguals in one; they draw instead from a common linguistic repertoire that leads them to often switch codes to meet their communicative needs.

Both Li’s translanguaging theory and Cummins’ interdependence theory view multilingualism as “a dynamically integrated system rather than a static accumulation of separate language skills,” but they differ in their understanding of what ‘language’ is as a construct.[6] García and Li Wei view named languages (L1, L2) as nothing but an invention of (monolingual) colonizers and linguists. They write: “Translanguaging validates the fact that bilingual students’ language practices are not separated into an L1 and an L2, or into home language and school language, instead transcending both.”[7] In forthcoming work, they further add: “The term ‘translanguaging’ is used to refer to how speakers deploy their full linguistic/semiotic/multimodal repertoire without regard for watchful adherence to the socially and politically defined boundaries of named languages to mean, to do and to be.”[8] For Cummins, by contrast, as for the Council of Europe, the dynamic model of multilingualism sees ‘named languages’ or codes such as L1 and L2 as linguistic and social realities with separate linguistic features; speakers switch codes and learn when to use one or the other, and when to transfer skills from one to the other. I propose that we view this switching as a migration of sorts between two ways of speaking, thinking and knowing. One could say that this theory is a “crosslinguistic translanguaging theory,” whereas García and Li’s theory is a “unitary translanguaging theory.”[9]

These two views on language affect differently what has been called “pedagogical translanguaging,” i.e., the application of translanguaging to the teaching of second or foreign languages in institutional settings.[10] While García advocates validating minority students’ home language at school as a marker of their unitary bilingual identity, and encourages teachers to use translanguaging as the “transcending” language of the classroom, European and Canadian educators prefer the concept of plurilingualism, in which each language retains its own specificity, and the difference between home language and academic language becomes the object of cross-linguistic pedagogic reflection and analysis.[11] Under the concept of plurilingualism, many of the language teaching and language policy initiatives promoted by the Council of Europe are firmly grounded in a cross-linguistic conception of language teaching and learning that encourages students to use their full linguistic repertoire in flexible and strategic ways, as a tool for cognitive development and academic learning.

In both translanguaging and plurilingualism, the prefix refers to fluid practices that go beyond socially constructed language systems and structures to engage a variety of meaning-making (or multimodal) systems. These practices are characterized by what I have called a “migrant mindset.” They have “a transformative” effect on “individuals’ cognition and social structures.”[12] They also have “transdisciplinary consequences as they reconceptualize language, language learning and language use across the divides between linguistics, psychology, sociology, and education.”[13] Currently, the translanguagingengouement in language education is being matched by efforts to promote transpositioningas an intercultural communication theory for the development of intercultural understanding across cultures.[14]

Much of the current enthusiasm for trans- practices is a response to the overwhelming need of educators to deal with the multilingual nature of their classrooms, and of the workplaces they prepare their students to enter.[15] It certainly addresses the political challenges of social justice and inclusion, but it also raises questions. Cummins contests the view that the common underlying proficiency of bilinguals precludes any study of the plurilingual differences between linguistic systems and their use in different cultural contexts.[16] Some fear that in the teaching of languages other than English, unitary translanguaging serves to insert English as a global language in all communication, whatever the language, thus reinforcing the linguistic and epistemic domination of the anglophone world.[17] Others decry the slow demise of monolingual national cultures and literatures.[18] Yet others fear that unitary translanguaging, by seeking to transcend linguistic specificities, ignores the cultural specificities in which various languages are used. These specificities include the crucial dimensions of time (or historicity) and relationality (or subjectivity) in any language learning, as I show in the next section.[19]

Cultural migration as involving both historicity and subjectivity

Up to the 1990s the term culture was unproblematically linked to national languages and national histories and traditions. For example, it was taken for granted that the teaching of the German language would necessarily include becoming familiar with German philosophy and literature. With increased transnational migrations and globalization, the goals of foreign language education have changed. In 2009, the MLA Ad Hoc Committee on Foreign Languages identified the goal of advanced language learning as translingual and transcultural competence:

The language major should be structured to produce a specific outcome: educated speakers who have deep translingual and transcultural competence. Advanced language training often seeks to replicate the competence of an educated native speaker, a goal that postadolescent learners rarely reach. The idea of translingual and transcultural competence, in contrast, places value on the ability to operate between languages.20

The big C culture of literature and the arts, which had been a staple of foreign language education in the decades following WWII, was first reduced to the “small c culture” of everyday life, then to intercultural communication between individual speakers and to a sociolinguistic facet of any verbal exchange between two individuals of different race, ethnicity, social class, gender or nationality.[21] The learning of a foreign culture came to denote not an essentialized product, but a historical process of migrating back and forth between various cultures. In 1998, I proposed a definition of “culture” that encompassed both small c and big C culture, and both social and historical processes of belonging. In that definition, culture was seen as the co-constructed “membership in a discourse community that shares a common social space and history, and common imaginings. Even when they have left that community, its members may retain, wherever they are, a common system of standards for perceiving, believing, evaluating, and acting. These standards are what is generally called their ‘culture’.”[22]

By that definition, with much of today’s communication occurring online in different languages by speakers of different cultures, is there still a place for “culture” in the foreign language education of the 21st century?[23] This was the question I asked myself when in August 2017 far-right white supremacists, neo-Nazis and members of the Ku Klux Klan marched in Charlottesville, Virginia brandishing burning torches and shouting racial and anti-semitic slogans to protest the removal of the statue of Robert E. Lee, the commander of the Confederate Army against Union forces in the American Civil War (1861-1865). Donald Trump, then, as now, President of the United States, supported the protesters, insisting that they were protecting their “cultural heritage,” including the rights of plantation owners to enslave humans. He tweeted: “Sad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments.”[24]

This incident triggered a national discussion about what “American culture” is in an increasingly linguistically and culturally divided United States. In contemporary America the Trump administration is waging wars against schools and universities, and their teaching of American history and culture.[25] Meanwhile, applied linguists are advocating a more multi-perspectival view of history, and a more fine-grained view of culture than that of the monolingual nation-state.[26] One such fine-grained view is to see language not only as linguistic structures, but also cognitive categories that organize our knowledge of the world. Indeed, from a cognitive linguistics viewpoint, our notion of culture includes schemas of perception and interpretation constructed and expressed through the categories offered by our languages.[27] One example is the category “cultural heritage” used by Donald Trump above, which implies historic continuity and the consecration of time, the organic nature of family, and the inalienable rights of ownership—a monolingual exclusionary understanding of “culture” that many foreign language educators now problematize. That does not mean that national cultures cannot, and should not, be taught in the foreign language classroom, only that they are open to more than one historical interpretation.

In applied linguistics today the term “culture” has become synonymous with historicity and subjectivity. Language as discourse is inseparable from the historical time and position of the speaker, and from the speaker’s and the listener’s subjective emotions, memories, perceptions, and anticipations. Teaching students texts from various periods of history, and juxtaposing them with other texts, comparing the way they understand these texts in light of their own experience and how past generations of readers understood them in light of theirs—these are all sound transcultural practices that combine historicity and subjectivity in the teaching of culture.[28] Realizing that culture operates on different timescales and along different speaker positionings, as Blommaert suggests, presumes that culture is not an essentialized static product, but a time- and position-sensitive process: a migrant mode of language use.[29]

Epistemic migration. Transknowledging

Culture in the migrant mode can be the site of verbal play and emotional gravity, in real and fictional worlds alike. In the following, I examine this migrant mode at work as a literary device in one of the most emblematic German novels of the 20th century: Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg, first published in 1924. In my analysis, I will draw attention to the relation between the linguistic (language) and the epistemic (knowledge) in the multilingual games played by some of the characters in the novel.

The novel begins by introducing us to Hans Castorp, a young German engineer, who has come from the lowlands of Northern Germany to the highlands of Alpine Switzerland to pay a visit to his cousin in a sanatorium in Davos. He ultimately remains for several months, an unwitting migrant suspended in this Kurort. One day, at a “Walpurgisnacht,” or carnival, party organized by the director, Castorp takes a fascination to one of the guests, Clawdia Chauchat, a Russian émigrée, with whom he speaks German. Swapping the reality of the sanatorium for the surreality of the carnival, they start flirting with one another. He first addresses her with the informal “du” and a pick-up line in German: “Hast du nicht vielleicht einen Bleistift?”[30] Chauchat follows suit in German but soon switches to French with an initial hesitation between the informal tu and formal vous: “Voilà… Prenez garde, il est un peu fragile . . .. C’est à visser, tu sais.”[31] But she soon adopts Castorp’s intimate use of tu and they both translanguage between German and French, i.e., a foreign, but obviously seductive language for both of them.[32] Two pages later, as they talk (still in French) about a portrait that the head doctor, Behrens, has made of her, she abruptly reinstates the “vous” and insists that Castorp speak German:

“Tu l’as trouvé réussi mon portrait?”
“Mais oui, extrêmement. Behrens a très exactement rendu ta peau, oh vraiment très fidèlement. J’aimerais beaucoup être portraitiste, moi aussi, pour avoir l’occasion d’étudier ta peau comme lui.”
“Parlez allemand, s’il vous plaît!”
“Oh, ich spreche Deutsch, auch auf französisch. C’est une sorte d’étude artistique et médicale – en un mot: il s’agit des lettres humaines, tu comprends. Wie ist es nun, willst du nicht tanzen?”33

The translanguaging that takes place in this well-known scene is not just a switch of code. It indexes Castorp’s transgression of good taste when he talks openly about the lady’s “skin.” At least in French cultivated circles, this is quite inappropriate. Chauchat’s injunction to speak German doesn’t require Castorp so much to switch linguistic system, as to adopt a less crude register, supposedly because talking about “die Haut einer Dame” in German would be more acceptable than saying the same thing in French, or because the German in this case positions both of them in a less intimate relationship than if they were to use French. Castorp’s quip “Oh ich spreche Deutsch, auch auf französisch” is a savvy pirouette that will enable the dialogue to move from linguistic translanguaging to cultural transknowledging (see below). Note the capitalized Deutsch in contrast to the lowercase französisch. Castorp juxtaposes “Deutsch sprechen” as a marker of national identity (i.e., to speak as a German) with the purely linguistic act of speaking “auf französisch.”  

Indeed, the conversation moves from the languages they are speaking to the cultural stereotypes they associate with these languages, and through which they show their knowledge of each other.

“Poète” sagte sie. “Bourgeois, humaniste et poète – voilà l’Allemand au complet, comme il faut!”
“Je crains que nous ne soyons pas du tout et nullement comme il faut” antwortete er. “Sous aucun égard. Nous sommes peut-être des Sorgenkinder des Lebens, tout simplement [. . .] Moi, tu le remarques bien, je ne parle guère le français. Pourtant avec toi, je préfère cette langue à la mienne, car pour moi, parler français, c’est parler sans parler, en quelque manière – sans responsabilité, ou comme nous parlons en rêve. Tu comprends?” 34

The stereotypes of German and French speakers would have been recognizable to the readers of the time. Chauchat is as prejudiced in how she sees the Germans (and idealizes the French), as Castorp is in how he sees himself speaking French. Carnival is an appropriate time to engage in these stereotypical (ir)realities and to migrate back and forth between real and imagined identities. Both the seductiveness of French and the poetic humanism of German will have to confront the brutal reality of WWI at the end of the novel.

But for the moment, Castorp can play at collapsing the two linguistic systems. His rejoinder in German has made a mockery of the boundaries between named languages. In his view, it is possible to speak German while speaking French, and vice-versa, in amorous encounters between two people who choose to speak in the global language of seduction. French serves not only as a “third” place between Castorp’s German and Chauchat’s Russian; its grammar is also manipulated to say things with social impunity: the pun on “l’Allemand au complet, comme il faut” intended by Chauchat to mean “The complete German, as is proper” gets played back by Hans Castorp as “I fear we Germans are not proper (i.e., respectable),” thus completing a less flattering cultural portrait of “the Germans.” In this dialogue, the two protagonists exchange not only words, but feelings, emotions, memories, fantasies—a knowledge of what it means to be “German.” One could say that the result is a verbal feat of cross-linguistic translanguaging, but also an achievement in transknowledging, of associating the two languages with two different ways of making meaning: one serious, bourgeois and sentimental, the other playful and dream-like.[35]

In this sense we can say that Castorp’s quip “pour moi, parler français c’est parler sans parler – sans responsabilité” expresses poetically a truth that researchers in second language acquisition have reflected upon under the rubric of meaning-making—a process in which language as discourse produces a knowledge that is associated both with social responsibility and poetic creativity. In this case, the use of German indexes for Chauchat a particular knowledge about Germans, whereas French for Castorp indexes a fantasy knowledge about speakers of French.

How can we bring back the insights gained through the reading of such literary examples to the mundane task of developing a migrant mindset in the learning of a foreign language? In other words, how can we help learners of German relate the workings of language between Castorp and Chauchat to their own communicative ability in acquiring the use of German in everyday life? In the next section I discuss how to supplement the mundane concept of “communicative competence” by a competence known as “symbolic competence” that capitalizes on the performativity of language to reframe thought and action.

4. Disciplinary migration between theory and practice: Symbolic competence

Around the same time as Li Wei proposed the concept of translanguaging as a “practical theory of language,” I proposed considering the whole field of applied linguistics as a “theory of the practice.”[36] While I drew on sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s Outline of a Theory of Practice (Esquisse d’une théorie de la pratique, 1972) and Language and Symbolic Power (Langage et pouvoir symbolique, 1991), Li Wei, as discussed above, was drawing on the work of psycholinguists Jim Cummins and Vivian Cook to propose moving beyond monolingual theories of language acquisition. [37] Both Li Wei and I felt the need to go beyond the concept of communicative competence proposed by second language acquisition scholars in the eighties, and to observe how multilingual speakers actually used language in everyday social life before we could make any recommendation for classroom teaching. But we drew different theoretical conclusions.

 García and Li Wei observed how immigrants from Latin-America and China constantly switched and mixed respectively: English and Spanish in Los Angeles, English and Mandarin/Cantonese/Shanghainese codes in online exchanges.[38] They then used their observations to develop the notion of translanguaging that I discussed above. By contrast, Anne Whiteside and I observed the way undocumented migrants from Yucatan in the Mission district of San Francisco used Spanish, Maya, Chinese, Vietnamese, and English, depending on the symbolic power each language wielded with various shopkeepers in the district, as well as with the police.[39] We noticed how these migrants displayed a migrating mindset that was both geographic and linguistic: a mindset that enabled them to adapt their language and their culture to the multilingual nature of their environment. This was more than the usual ‘communicative competence’ that second language acquisition theory touted as the goal of foreign language learning—i.e., the ability to express, interpret and negotiate intended meanings.[40] Drawing on Bourdieu’s theory of symbolic power, Whiteside and I suggested that the observed communicative exchanges displayed an additional layer of symbolic power that redefined the relationship between migrant customers and local merchants. I called this added layer “symbolic competence.”[41]

Thus, Li Wei’s and my observations led us to different conclusions. Li Wei went on to develop his theory of translanguaging that I described in Section 1, while I developed a theory of symbolic competence and symbolic power, of which the exchange between Clawdia Chauchat and Hans Castorp provide an example.[42] In her translation of my formulation of symbolic competence, Simone Schiedermair offers a definition of symbolic competence:

Grundlegend lässt sich symbolische Kompetenz bestimmen als die Fähigkeit, symbolische Systeme zu manipulieren, Zeichen und ihre vielfältigen Beziehungen zu anderen Zeichen zu interpretieren, semiotische Praktiken zu nutzen, um Bedeutung zu produzieren und zu vermitteln und um sich selbstbestimmt im alltäglichen Machtspiel zu positionieren (Bourdieu 1991). Die Selbstpositionierung umfasst auch die Fähigkeit, die Dimension kultureller Erinnerungen einzuschätzen, die von symbolischen Systemen hervorgerufen werden (symbolische Repräsentation), alternative Wirklichkeiten zu entwerfen (symbolische Aktion) und selbstbestimmt und kreativ am Spiel der Mehrsprachigkeit teilzunehmen (symbolische Macht).43

In my view, the concept of symbolic competence encompasses: a keen sense of the cultural memories evoked by symbolic systems, e.g., the historic connotations of a concept like bourgeois in French and in German, or the historicity and subject-positioning attached to a French expression like “comme il faut”; an awareness of the capacity of language to perform and create alternate realities, as Castorp and Chauchat do when they switch to French; and an ability to reframe the context of an interaction with an interlocutor or with a text.[44]

Such a competence is also at work in the silent dialogue between a literary text and its readers—in this case, between the narrator of Der Zauberberg and its readers both in 1924 and today.[45] If, in a pedagogic perspective, any literary text is meant to sharpen the students’ symbolic competence, one could say that while the characters model such a competence through their ability to adapt their discourse to the ambient fictional context, the narrator manifests such a competence by choosing how to represent the characters’ discourse stylistically, and the readers show symbolic competence by recognizing and analyzing both, and by constructing the relevance of this process in their own lives.[46] Such a symbolic competence is particularly necessary when readers try to interpret the stereotypes associated with each language as used by plurilingual characters. For example, if Chauchat is a native speaker of Russian, and Castorp a native speaker of German, and if French is a foreign language for both of them, do they share common stereotypes about the French and are these stereotypes also those of their readers? Do the readers share Chauchat’s stereotypes about the Germans?

The notion of symbolic competence has had more resonance in Europe than in the U.S., especially in Germany, which, like the UK, still has a strong stylistic literary tradition in language education, and has been particularly receptive to Bourdieu’s theory of symbolic power.[47] In Germany, symbolic competence has been mostly applied to the poeticity/literariness of language itself. I discuss this below.

Literariness as migration between form and content, structure and discourse

Symbolic competence includes an acute awareness of what Roman Jakobson called literaturnost or literariness, that is, the poetic function of language that focuses not only on the content, but also on the form of the message itself, or more precisely on the relation between the materiality of words and their referents in the world.[48] The French poet Mallarmé used to say to his friend Edgar Degas: “Mais mon cher Degas, ce n’est pas avec des idées qu’on fait les poèmes, c’est avec des mots!”[49] The focus of the poetic function is not on referentiality but on structure, voice, style, choice of words, and their arrangement. The German Romanist Harald Weinrich would later expand the insights of both Jakobson and Mallarmé by comparing the learning of a foreign language to a literary experience: “Das Erlernen einer Fremdsprache birgt im Kern eine literarische Erfahrung in sich, indem sie die Unselbstverständlichkeit der Verbindung der Wörter mit den “Sachen” augenfällig macht.”[50]

In the last fifteen years, Jakobson’s literariness has been picked up in Germany under the name Literarizität, that Dobstadt and Foschi define as the poetic or self-referential function of language, that is, the ability of speakers to reflect through language on the very language they are using.[51] As they describe it, “Poetizität wird [von Jakobson] nicht an bestimmten Merkmalen des sprachlichen Gegenstands festgemacht, sondern als das Ergebnis einer bestimmten Einstellung zu ihm bestimmt.”[52] What makes an utterance “literary” is not an intrinsic property of language, but a positioning (Einstellung) of the speaker/writer toward the message as such, a focus on language for its own sake, on its poetic function ─ a migration of sorts into a different position. As a result,

jeder Text, jede sprachliche Äusserung birgt literarisches Potenzial – das ist die überraschende, auf Positionen der Frühromantik verweisende Pointe Jakobsons, durch die er die Poetizität/Literarizität der exklusiven Zuständigkeit einer Disziplin entzog und zum Gegenstand eines interdisziplinären Gesprächs machte.53

As a personal example, I like to think that what attracted me to the German language I was studying at the Sorbonne in the fifties was precisely the unexpected relation of the sounds and shapes of German, and the things it was referring to.[54] I developed an early inkling of what symbolic competence could be while listening to an actor from the Berliner Ensemble recite from memory Kleist’s Bettelweib von Locarno at the Goethe-Institut in Paris.

Am Fuße der Alpen bei Locarno im oberen Italien befand sich ein altes, einem Marchese gehöriges Schloß, das man jetzt, wenn man vom St. Gotthard kommt, in Schutt und Trümmern liegen sieht: ein Schloß mit hohen und weitläufigen Zimmern, in deren einem einst auf Stroh, das man ihr unterschüttete, eine alte kranke Frau, die sich bettelnd vor der Tür eingefunden hatte, von der Hausfrau aus Mitleiden gebettet worden war.55

Perhaps it was my philological French training in explication de texte that made me pay attention to every word, perhaps it was my multilingual mindset, but that oversize opening sentence with its syntactic parallelisms, its extended participial construction, the cumulative effect of its assonances and alliterations, had an unforgettable effect on my imagination. Physically, I felt the power of the ineluctable destiny that was about to unfold and that no one could prevent. I was experiencing not literature, but literaricity itself—the precise match of words and world, of form and content, to elicit a particular feeling of dread and awe that enabled me to put the text in relation with my own embodied experience of the war and its aftermath.

This relation has been picked up by German scholars such as Grimstein and Hille, who remind us that language as discourse can be a poetic-literary experience in many different genres, from mundane conversations to sonnets. They propose to link symbolic competence and communicative competence in language teaching.[56]

Communicative migration between the real, the digital, and the neuronal AI

Finally, I come to the kind of migration we are all experiencing today in our communicative practices. Emails, texts, tweets, blogs, videos, have made us ubiquitous, but they have hijacked our attention, our ability to concentrate on one thing, and dimmed our interest in the past and the future. Through the internet, our knowledge has become encyclopedic but punctual, anecdotal, decontextualized, wikipedic; we have lost the ability to wander through a library’s bookshelves and read across references.

German language teachers, fearing replacement by Generative AI, point to the decrease in students’ ability to do sustained reading of literate forms of language, never mind the ability to write essay-length prose in correct Hochdeutsch, thus potentially stripping language teachers of one of their humanistic responsibilities.[57] The many European educators who suggest using pluri– instead of trans- as in plurilingual practices, seek to retain the sovereignty of each linguistic system and its forms of literacy, as we saw above.[58]

AI tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude are claimed to facilitate students’ reasoning, creativity and problem solving. But, based as they are on algorithms derived from large language models, they themselves don’t have any sense of historicity or subjectivity—they only have words that denote feelings, memories, fantasies etc. For us humans, these words connote other things, persons and events, lived and imagined. We have to develop what these platforms cannot, so that we don’t become digital chatbots ourselves.

To my mind, the intense debates taking place on American campuses these days on how to regulate the use of AI by our students, and the soul-searching questions they are raising in the training of young language teachers on the nature and ultimate goal of foreign language education, are a welcome development. They bring together social actors from different generations to rethink what we mean by language, culture, knowledge and identity in the digital age, and how we may all acquire a migrant mindset.

Conclusion: The migrant’s mindset

What I have discussed in this paper are current ways of looking at the learning and teaching of foreign languages, in particular German, through a multilingual lens. Faced with the overwhelming presence of English as a global language, teachers of national languages like French or German face the challenge of having to teach monolingual linguistic system—multilingually. What purchase does the migration metaphor gain us? While the obligation for a migrant to learn German if they want to live and work in Germany is a practical necessity, it is also theoretically fruitful to view the learning of German not as a monolingual security blanket against the uncertainties of globalization, but as an exciting migration from a monolingual to a plurilingual mindset. Indeed, the six migration modes discussed in this paper suggest that learning a second language is less a matter of acquiring another code, than a practice of decentering, and of cross-linguistic translanguaging from one mindset to another.[59]

This migrant mindset includes, in particular: resonating as a non-native speaker to new sounds, shapes, and modes of meaning making; discovering the absences, the untranslatables, mostly unshareables in the new language and in one’s own; experiencing the exhilaration of discovering new ways of speaking and knowing.[60] It includes confronting a different understanding of historical events one has lived through, and that one can now interpret through different words. Mostly, it entails bringing back to language education the historicity and subjectivity that are lacking in current applied linguistics.

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Cavalli, Mari, and Mirjam Egli Cuenat. “Translanguaging—Effet de mondialisation ou de domination?” Recherches en didactique des langues et des cultures, May 25, 2024. https://doi.org/10.4000/11qab.

Cenoz, Jasone, and Durk Gorter. Pedagogical Translanguaging. Elements in Language Teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/pedagogical-translanguaging/67802C1E5AE4A418AE3B8E2DEFBAD30A.

Cook, Vivian J. “Evidence for Multicompetence.” Language Learning 42, no. 4 (1992): 557–91. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-1770.1992.tb01044.x.

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Dobstadt, Michael, and Renate Riedner. “Überlegungen zu einer Didaktik der Literarizität im Kontext von Deutsch als Fremdsprache.” In Deutsch als Fremdsprache und Literaturwissenschaft. Zugriffe—Themenfelder—Perspektiven, edited by Michael Ewert, Simone Schiedermair, and Renate Riedner. Iudicium, 2011.

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García, Ofelia, and Li Wei. “Translanguaging.” In Encyclopedia of Bilingual Education/Encyclopédie de l’éducation bilingue, edited by Silvia Melo-Pfeifer and Christian Ollivier. Peter Lang, in press.

Gentil, Guillaume. “Translanguaging and Multilingual Academic Literacies: How Do We Translate That into French? Should We? Pour en faire quoi ? (Et pourquoi s’en faire?).” OLBI Journal 10 (2019). https://doi.org/10.18192/olbiwp.v10i0.3831.

Gramling, David. The Invention of Multilingualism. Key Topics in Applied Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/invention-of-multilingualism/1F18D2826BF3BCFA1F3C726FEF6E2340.

Grimmstein, Jens, and Almut Hille. “Symbolische und diskursive Kompetenzen fördern. Lektüren von Essays zur Globalisierung im Unterricht Deutsch als Fremdsprache.” In Deutsch als Fremd- und Zweitsprache & Kulturwissenschaft. Zugänge zu sozialen Wirklichkeiten. Iudicium, 2018.

Hawkins, Margaret R., and Junko Mori. “Considering ‘Trans-’ Perspectives in Language Theories and Practices.” Applied Linguistics 39, no. 1 (February 2018): 1–8. https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/amx056.

Holliday, A. “Small Cultures.” Applied Linguistics 20, no. 2 (June 1999): 237–64. https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/20.2.237.

Jakobson, Roman. “Linguistics and Poetics.” In Style in Language, edited by Thomas Sebeok. MIT Press, 1960.

Kaplan, Thomas. “Top Democrats Split Over Call to Remove Confederate Symbols: Delicate Path Ahead in the Capitol.” The New York Times (New York, N.Y), 2017. https://search.proquest.com/docview/2463300350?pq-origsite=primo.

Kleist, Heinrich von. “Das Bettelweib von Locarno.” Berliner Abendblätter (Berlin), October 11, 1810. https://de.wikisource.org/wiki/Das_Bettelweib_von_Locarno.

Koselleck, Reinhart. “Sozialgeschichte und Begriffsgeschichte.” In Sozialgeschichte in Deutschland, vol. 1, edited by Wolfgang Schieder and Volker Sellin. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1986.

Kramsch, Claire. “Applied Linguistics: A Theory of the Practice.” Applied Linguistics 36, no. 4 (September 2015): 454–65. https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/amv039.

Kramsch, Claire. “From Communicative Competence to Symbolic Competence.” The Modern Language Journal 90, no. 2 (2006): 249–52. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-4781.2006.00395_3.x.

Kramsch, Claire. “Is There Still a Place for Culture in a Multilingual FL Education?” Language Education and Multilingualism 1 (2018): 16–33.

Kramsch, Claire. Language and Culture. OUP Oxford, 1998.

Kramsch, Claire. “Poetic Equivalence: Key to the Development of Symbolic Competence.” In Rehumanizing the Language Curriculum, edited by Megan M. Echevarría. Peter Lang, 2023. https://www.peterlang.com/document/1292450.

Kramsch, Claire. “Symbolische Kompetenz.” In Deutsch als Fremd- und Zweitsprache & Kulturwissenschaft. Zugänge zu sozialen Wirklichkeiten, edited by Simone Schiedermair, translated by Simone Schiedermair. Iudicium, 2018.

Kramsch, Claire. “Symbolische Kompetenz durch literarische Texte.” Fremdsprache Deutsch, no. 44 (2011): 35–40.

Kramsch, Claire. The Multilingual Subject. OUP Oxford, 2009.

Kramsch, Claire. “The Symbolic Dimensions of the Intercultural.” Language Teaching 44, no. 3 (July 2011): 354–67. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0261444810000431.

Kramsch, Claire. “Trans-Spatial Utopias.” Applied Linguistics 39, no. 1 (February 2018): 108–15. https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/amx057.

Kramsch, Claire, and Anne Whiteside. “Language Ecology in Multilingual Settings. Towards a Theory of Symbolic Competence.” Applied Linguistics 29, no. 4 (December 2008): 645–71. https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/amn022.

Lakoff, George. Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind. University of Chicago Press, 2008.

Lee, T.K., Hua Zhu, and Li Wei. Transpositioning: Intercultural Communication beyond Language and Culture. Cambridge University Press, forthcoming.

Lewis, Gwyn, Bryn Jones, and Colin Baker. “Translanguaging: Developing Its Conceptualisation and Contextualisation.” Educational Research and Evaluation 18, no. 7 (October 2012): 655–70. https://doi.org/10.1080/13803611.2012.718490.

Lütge, Christiane, Thorsten Merse, and Petra Rauschert, eds. Global Citizenship in Foreign Language Education: Concepts, Practices, Connections. New York: Routledge, 2022. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003183839.

Mann, Thomas. Der Zauberberg. S. Fischer Verlag, 1924. Reprint, G. B. Fischer Verlag, 1956.

MLA Ad Hoc Committee on Foreign Languages and Higher Education. “New Structures for a Changed World.” Profession, 2007, 237.

Ollivier, Christian, and Silvia Melo-Pfeifer, eds. Encyclopédie de l’éducation plurilingue/Encyclopedia of Plurlingual Education. Peter Lang, in press.

Pennycook, Alistair. “From Translanguaging to Translingual Activism.” In Decolonizing Foreign Language Education: The Misteaching of English and Other Colonial Languages, edited by Donaldo Macedo. Routledge, 2019.

Riedner, Renate. “Aspekte einer Didaktik der Literarizität: Lyrisches Schreiben im DaF-Unterricht.” In Poetizität Interdisziplinär. Poetizität/Literarizität als Gegenstand interdisziplinärer Diskussion: Sprachwissenschaft, Literaturwissenschaft, Fremd- und Zweitsprachendidaktik, edited by Michael Dobstadt and Albert Foschi. Villa Vigoni, 2019.

Sack, Kevin. “Slavery Is Our Shared History. We Deserve to Know About It: Op-Ed.” The New York Times (New York, N.Y), 2025. Late Edition (East Coast) Edition. https://www.proquest.com/docview/3247571821?pq-origsite=primo.

Schiedermair, Simone. Deutsch als Fremd- und Zweitsprache und Kulturwissenschaft. Eine Einführung in Thema und Band, edited by Simone Schiedermair. München: Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, 2018. https://epub.ub.uni-muenchen.de/127008/.

Singh, Michael, and Lĭ Xiăo-Lí. “Bourdieu and Sayad’s Contributions to Researching Multilingually: Creating Knowledge through Postmonolingual Theorising.” In Researching Multilingually, edited by Bridget Goodman and Brian Seilstad, 31–54. Channel View Publications, 2024. https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/85213115385.

Valéry, Paul. Degas Danse Dessin. Ambroise Vollard, 1937.Wei, Li. “Translanguaging as a Practical Theory of Language.” Applied Linguistics 39, no. 1 (February 2018): 9–30. https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/amx039.

Wei, Li. “Translanguaging as a Practical Theory of Language.” Applied Linguistics 39, no. 1 (February 2018): 9–30. https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/amx039.

[1] Claire Kramsch, The Multilingual Subject (Oxford University Press, 2009).

[2] Heidi Bojsen et. al., eds., Translanguaging and Epistemological Decentring in Higher Education and Research (Multilingual Matters, 2023) (for studying the bi- or multilingual cosmopolitan speaker); Ofelia García and Li Wei Translanguaging: Language, Bilingualism and Education (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) (for code-switching); C. Lütge et. al., eds., Global Citizenship in Foreign Language Education (Routledge, 2023) (for notions of global citizen); Alastair Pennycook, “From Translanguaging to Translingual Activism” in Decolonizing Foreign Language Education: The Misteaching of English and Other Colonial Languages, ed. Donaldo Macedo (Routledge, 2019), 169-185. (for decolonization/translingualism); David Gramling, The Invention of Multilingualism (Cambridge University Press, 2021) (for technology, language and value).

[3] Gwyn Lewis, Bryn Jones & Colin Baker, “Translanguaging: origins and development from school to street and beyond,” Educational Research and Evaluation 18, no. 7 (2012): 641-651.

[4] Ofelia García and Li Wei, Translanguaging: Language, Bilingualism and Education (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); Li Wei, “Translanguaging as a Practical Theory of Language,” Applied Linguistics 39, no. 1 (2018): 9-30.

[5] Jim Cummins, Rethinking The Education of Multilingual Learners. A Critical Analysis of Theoretical Concepts (Multilingual Matters, 2021).

[6] Jim Cummins, Rethinking The Education of Multilingual Learners, 231.

[7] García and Li Wei 2014, 69.

[8] Ofelia García & Li Wei, “Translanguaging,” in Encyclopedia of bilingual education/Encyclopédie de l’éducation bilingue, ed. Christian Ollivier and Sílvia Melo-Pfeifer (Peter Lang, in press).

[9] Jim Cummins, “Pedagogical translanguaging: Examining the credibility of unitary versus crosslinguistic translanguaging theory,” Cahiers d’OLBI/OLBI Journal 12 (2022): 33-55.

[10] Jim Cummins, “Pedagogical translanguaging: Examining the credibility of unitary versus crosslinguistic translanguaging theory,” 33-55.; Jasone Cenoz and Durk Gorter, Pedagogical Translanguaging (Cambridge University Press, 2021).

[11] Peter Auer, ‘Translanguaging’ or ‘doing languages’? Multilingual practices and the notion of ‘codes’, in Multilingual perspectives on translanguaging, ed. Jeff McSwan (Multilingual Matters, 2022): 126-153.

[12] Li Wei, “Translanguaging as a Practical Theory of Language,” 27.

[13] Li Wei, “Translanguaging as a Practical Theory of Language,” 27.

[14] Lee T.K, Hua Zhu, and Li Wei. Transpositioning: Intercultural Communication beyond Language and Culture (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). 

[15] Margaret R. Hawkins and Junko Mori, “Considering ‘Trans- Perspectives in Language Theories and Practices,” Applied Linguistics 39, no. 1 (2018): 1-8.

[16] Cummins, “Pedagogical translanguaging: Examining the credibility of unitary versus crosslinguistic translanguaging theory.”

[17] See, among others, Marisa Cavalli and Mirjam Egli Cuenat, “Translanguaging – effet de mondialisation ou de domination ?,” Recherches en didactique des langues et des cultures 22, no. 2 ( 2024).

[18] Guillaume Gentil, “Translanguaging and Multilingual Academic Literacies: How Do We Translate that into French? Should We? Pour en faire quoi? (et pourquoi s’en faire?),” Cahier d’OLBI/OLBI Working papers 10 (2019), 3-41.

[19]Claire Kramsch, “Trans-spatial Utopias,” Applied Linguistics 39, no.1 (2018): 108-115.

[20] MLA Ad Hoc Committee on Foreign Languages and Higher Education, “New Structures for a Changed World,” Profession (2007), 237.

[21] A. Holliday, “Small cultures,” Applied Linguistics 20, no. 2 (1999): 237-264 (see for “culture” paradigms); Byram 1997 (for individual speakers).

[22] Claire Kramsch, Language and Culture (Oxford University Press, 1998), 10.

[23] Claire Kramsch, “Is there still a place for culture in a multilingual FL education?,” Language Education and Multilingualism 1 (2018), 16-33.

[24] Donald Trump quoted in Thomas Kaplan, “Top Democrats Split Over Call to Remove Confederate Symbols: Delicate Path Ahead in the Capitol,” The New York Times, August 18, 2017, A14.

[25] Kevin Sack, “Slavery is Our Shared History. We Deserve to Know About It: Op-Ed,” New York Times, September 7, 2025.

[26] Jan Blommaert, “Chapter 6: History and process,” in Discourse: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 2005) (see for multiperspectival view of history); David Gramling, The Invention of Monolingualism (Bloomsbury, 2016) (for moving beyond the monolingual nation-state).

[27] George Lakoff, Women, Fire and Dangerous Things (University of Chicago Press, 1987).

[28] Claire Kramsch, “The Symbolic Dimensions of the Intercultural,” Language Teaching 44, no. 3 (2011): 354–67.

[29] Blommaert, “ Chapter 6” in Discourse (see for different speaker positionings).

[30] Thomas Mann, Der Zauberberg (G.B. Fischer Verlag, 1956 [1924]), 306: “Do you happen to have a pencil by any chance?” This, and subsequent translations, are my own.

[31] Thomas Mann, Der Zauberberg, 306: “─ Here. Be cautious, it is a little fragile. It is meant to be screwed, you know [. . .]”

[32] The French language has been seen, ever since Louis XIV and his court in Versailles, as the language of high culture, sophistication and amorous pursuit. For Madame Chauchat, a Russian émigrée, French might have represented the language spoken by the Russian aristocracy and intelligentsia. Since 1894, it was also the language of the Franco-Russian Alliance. For Castorp, a middle-class engineer, who possibly learned French in a German high school, it might have represented the epitome of highbrow culture and sophistication. Since the narrator in this scene does not intervene but lets the characters’ voices speak for themselves, the reader is made to feel the full impact of the seduction of the ‘language of love.’ That language becomes all the more poignant at the end of the novel, when we see Hans Castorp recruited to serve in the trenches of WWI. The French spoken in that dialogue can then be seen not just as a bridge between two worlds that will soon be slaughtering each other in the killing fields of Flanders between the Germans and the French, but also those of East Prussia between the Germans and the Russians.

[33] Mann, Der Zauberberg, 306:
“Did you find my portait successful?”
“Oh yes, extremely. Behrens captured your skin perfectly, truly quite lifelike. I would very much have liked to be a portrait painter myself, if only to have the chance to study your skin, as he did.”
“Please, sir, speak German!”
“Oh, but I am speaking German, even in French. Painting is the kind of study that is both artistic and medical—in a word: it is, you see, a humanistic pursuit. So what do you say, shall we dance?”

[34] Mann, Der Zauberberg, 309:
“A poet!” she said. “A bourgeois, a humanist, and a poet— Here you have the complete German, as is proper!”
“I’m afraid we are not at all, not in the least, proper,” he replied. “Not in any way. We are perhaps life’s problem children, that’s all.” […] As you’ve surely noticed, I barely speak French. All the same, I would rather speak with you in French than in my own language, since for me speaking French is like speaking without speaking somehow—without any responsibility, the way we speak in a dream. Do you understand?”

[35] Michael Singh & Lĭ Xiăo-Lí, “Bourdieu and Sayad’s contributions to researching multilingually: Creating knowledge through postmonolingual theorizing,” in Researching Multilingually: Conceptual and Methodological Failures, Struggles and Successes, ed. Bridget Goodman and Michael Seilstad (Multilingual Matters, 2025), 36, 40; Pierre Bourdieu and Abdelmayak Sayad, The Uprooting: The Crisis of Traditional Agriculture in Algeria, trans. Susan Emanuel from French Le déracinement. La crise de l’agriculture traditionnelle en Algérie (Polity Press, 1964/2020). According to Singh and Xiao-Li, transknowledging was an explicit verbal strategy used by Pierre Bourdieu and Abdelmayek Sayad to describe the family practices they observed in Algeria, when they were doing fieldwork there in the fifties during the Algerian war. Instead of translating the notions they heard used in the three local languages—Kabyle Taqbaylit, Algerian Arabic Darija, and Parisian French—they retained them in the original language and glossed their meaning in French, such as in the following sentence: “The Kabyle’s akham (homes, houses) or dwellings (l’habitat) and their jema’a (village assembly) were subjected to les regroupements (forcible resettlement)” (40).Transknowledging thus enabled them to retain the indigenous epistemologies indexed by these languages by using what they called “multilingual thinking tools” (36).

[36] Li Wei 2018; Claire Kramsch, “Applied Linguistics: A Theory of the Practice,” Applied Linguistics 36, no. 4 (2015): 454-65.

[37] Jim Cummins, “Rethinking Monolingual Instructional Strategies in Multilingual Classrooms,” The Canadian Journal of Applied Linguistics, 10 (2007): 221-240; Vivian J. Cook, “Evidence for Multicompetence,” Language Learning, V42, no. 4: 557-559. Cook, a British psycholinguist, coined the term “multicompetence” to refer to the knowledge of more than one language in one person’s mind. From the multicompetence perspective in Second Language Acquisition theory, the different languages a person speaks are seen as one connected system, rather than each language being a separate system. People who speak a second language are seen as unique multilingual individuals, rather than people who have merely attached another language to their repertoire.

[38] García and Li Wei, Translanguaging (2014).

[39] Claire Kramsch and Anne Whiteside, “Language Ecology in Multilingual Settings: Towards a Theory of Symbolic Competence,” Applied Linguistics 29, no. 4 (2008): 645-671.

[40]Michael P. Breen and Christopher N. Candlin, “The Essentials of A Communicative Curriculum in Language Teaching,” Applied Linguistics 1, no. 2 (1980): 89-112.

[41] Claire Kramsch, “From Communicative Competence to Symbolic Competence,” The Modern Language Journal 90, no. 2 (2006): 249-252.

[42] Kramsch, The Multilingual Subject; Claire Kramsch, “Symbolische Kompetenz durch literarische Texte,”Fremdsprache Deutsch 44 (2011), 35-40; Claire Kramsch, “The Symbolic Dimensions of the Intercultural,” Language Teaching 44, no. 3 (2011), 345-67 (see for symbolic competence); Claire Kramsch, Language as Symbolic Power (Cambridge University Press, 2021).

[43] Claire Kramsch, “Symbolische Kompetenz,” trsl. Simone Schiedermair, in Deutsch als Fremde- und Zweitsprache & Kulturwissenschaft. Zugänge zu sozialen Wirklichkeiten, ed. Simone Schiedermair (Iudicium, 2018): 193.

[44] Reinhart Koselleck, “Sozialgeschichte und Begriffsgeschichte,” in Sozialgeschichte in Deutschland, Bd.1, ed. Wolfgang Schieder and Volker Sellin (Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1986).

[45] Consult, for example, the work of Ron Carter, Guy Cook, Mick Short, Paul Simpson, Henry Widdowson.

[46] Claire Kramsch, “Poetic Equivalence: Key to the Development of Symbolic Competence,” in Rehumanizing the Language Curriculum, ed. Megan M. Echevarría (Peter Lang, 2023).

[47]Lothar Bredella et. al., eds., Literaturdidaktik im Dialog (Gunter Narr Verlag, 2004); 2004; Michael Dobstadt & Renate Riedner, “Überlegungen zu einer Didaktik der Literarizität im Kontext von Deutsch als Fremdsprache,” in Deutsch als Fremdsprache und Literaturwissenschaft. Zugriffe—Themenfelder—Perspektiven, ed. Michael Ewert, Renate Riedner and Simone Schiedermaier (Iudicium, 2011). Bourdieu’s theory of symbolic power, i.e., the power relations that individuals and institutions entertain through symbolic systems like language, has always found a very hospitable reception in Germany. His critiques of neoliberalism have resonated with German intellectuals, especially in discussions on cultural identity and globalization. His theories have been applied in Germany on various issues, including social inequality, education, and cultural analysis. His last book Esquisse pour une autoanalyse published by Raisons d’agir in 2004, appeared first in German under the title Ein soziologischer Selbstversuch, published by Suhrkamp in 2002.

[48] Roman Jakobson, “Linguistics and Poetics,” in Style in Language, ed. Thomas A. Sebeok (MIT Press, 1960).

[49] Paul Valéry, Degas Danse Dessin (Ambroise Vollard, 1937).

[50] Weinrich cited in Renate Riedner, “Aspekte einer Didaktik der Literarizität: Lyrisches Schreiben im DaF-Unterricht,” in Poetizität Interdisziplinär. Poetizität/Literarizität als Gegenstand interdisziplinärer Diskussion: Sprachwissenschaft, Literaturwissenschaft, Fremd und Zweitsprachendidaktik, ed. Michael Dobstadt and Albert Foschi (Villa Vigoni, 2019).

[51] Michael Dobstadt, ““Literarizität” als Basiskategorie für die Arbeit mit Literatur in DaF-Kontexten,” Deutsch als Fremdsprache 46, no. 1 (2009), 21-30; Dobstadt and Riedner, “Überlegungen”; Dobstadt and Foschi, Poetizität.

[52] Dobstadt and Foschi, Poetizität, 5.

[53] Dobstadt and Foschi, Poetizität, 5.

[54] Like all university students in France, I had learned my first foreign language (in my case, German), through the nine years of my secondary schooling, so I was able to appreciate this oral performance of Kleist’s prose in my second year of higher studies.

[55] Kleist, Heinrich von. “Das Bettelweib von Locarno,” Berliner Abendblatt, 39-42.

Das Bettelweib von Locarno – Wikisource

[56] Jens Grimmstein and Almut Hille, “Symbolische und diskursive Kompetenzen fördern. Lektüren von Essays zur Globalisierung im Unterricht Deutsch als Fremdsprache” in Deutsch als Fremd- und Zweitsprache & Kulturwissenschaft. Zugänge zu sozialen Wirklichkeiten, ed. Simone Schiedermair (Iudicium, 2018): 193.

[57] Claire Kramsch, “Fremdsprachendidaktik in unserer Zeit,” (Closing plenary at the Internationale Deutschlehrertagung, Lübeck, August 1, 2025).

[58]Christian Ollivier & Silvia Melo-Pfeifer, eds., Encyclopédie de l’éducation plurilingue/Encyclopedia of Plurilingual Education (Peter Lang, in press).

[59] Bojsen et. al., Translanguaging and Epistemological Decentering.

[60] Kramsch, The Multilingual Subject, “Poetic Equivalence.”

By