Languaging sojourner's experience: narrative accounts of learning a second language abroad

• Autores: Anna Szcezepaniak-Kozak
• Localización: Languaging experiences: Learning and teaching revisited / coord. por Hadrian Lankiewicz, Emilia Wasikiewicz-Firlej, 2014, ISBN 978-1-4438-5341-5, págs. 130-156
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • The starting point for this chapter is the author 's assumption that linguistic performance is always conditioned by individual experience and knowledge, both of which are not isolated or decontextualised but linked to actual activities and interactions. Moreover, understandings achieved by two different persons or understandings achieved by the same person but corroborated at different time-spaces will never be identical but convergent at best. Hence, the author's intention is to offer and at the same time gain insight into the personalised, idiosyncratic, ever-changing experience of language users, in this particular case sojourn students during their stay in Italy. She puts forward that the narrative approach can serve as a useful tool for such an investigation, with its strong inclination towards deep probing into human experience. In particular, the narrative approach enables understanding individual meaning making and interpretation processes and how they are languaged. She relies on narrative accounts of Dutch sojourn students and analyses changes in their self-perception and motivation to learn Italian, and the way this experience is visible in video-recorded narrative sessions. The sojourn becomes in these accounts an opportunity for self-recognition and realisation that language enables us to control our surroundings.