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The Multilingual Subject
Author(s) -
Kramsch Claire
Publication year - 2006
Publication title -
international journal of applied linguistics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.712
H-Index - 39
eISSN - 1473-4192
pISSN - 0802-6106
DOI - 10.1111/j.1473-4192.2006.00109.x
Subject(s) - memoir , subject (documents) , embodied cognition , sensibility , linguistics , reflexivity , foreign language , psychology , sociology , computer science , art , pedagogy , anthropology , literature , world wide web , philosophy , artificial intelligence
This book explores the experience of adolescents and young adults who learn a foreign language or use more than one language in daily life. Through ‘language memoirs’ and learners’ testimonies, it documents how these multilingual subjects occupy an embodied, socially and culturally inflected third place in language, filled with memories of other languages and fantasies of other identities. In its referential and mythic dimensions, language performs and creates subjectivities that these multilingual speakers use to conjure alternative worlds and virtual selves, both in real life and on the internet. Teaching to the multilingual subject would mean capitalizing on the potential playfulness, heightened reflexivity and aesthetic sensibility of the increasing number of people around the world who, by choice or necessity, experience life in several languages.