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Conclusion: Paralipomena

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15 views3 pages

Conclusion: Paralipomena

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Tianwen Han
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© © All Rights Reserved
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Conclusion

In the first edition of this monograph, I used the Conclusion to raise ques-
tions about ICC and the learning of a language as a lingua franca, and
about the designation ‘foreign language teaching’.
In the meantime, the position of English as a lingua franca has become
ever more dominant1 and the notion that a language is ‘foreign’ to a par-
ticular country ever more doubtful. Mobility due to economic globalisa-
tion is the prime reason for both. English has become – at least for the
foreseeable future – the global lingua franca and, as people take their
languages with them, most countries have speakers of many languages
resident in them, meaning that the languages are no longer ‘foreign’. For
convenience, in this edition I have continued to use ‘foreign’ as I explained
at the beginning since every designation raises its own problems.
In the first edition I also emphasised that ‘teaching’ should be replaced
by ‘education’. The fi nal quotation from 1997 remains as powerful as ever
and one which should fittingly close this second edition too:
What we may learn by studying other cultures [and languages, I would
add] are not merely possibilities of different ways of doing things, other
techniques. More importantly we may learn different possibilities of
making sense of human life, different ideas about the possible importance
that the carrying out of certain activities may take on for a [person] trying
to contemplate the sense of [their] life as a whole. (Winch, 1964: 321)

Paralipomena
The first version of this monograph was written in the 1990s when I
first began to work with the Council of Europe. Because I had published
a book on Cultural Studies in Foreign Language Education in 1989 and
carried out a large-scale empirical research project around the same time,
my work came to the notice of John Trim who led the Council of Europe
work on languages. John had been head of Linguistics in Cambridge when
I was an undergraduate and he had invited me when he was Head of CILT
in the 1980s to be a member of a group dealing with Language Awareness,
where I also met the other doyen of language teaching in the UK, Eric
Hawkins.

153
154 Teaching and Assessing Intercultural Communicative Competence

I began to lecture and act as animateur on Council of Europe work-


shops in the 1990s and was then invited to write a supporting paper on the
assessment of intercultural competence for the group which was writing
what became the Common European Framework of Reference for
Languages. In the meantime I had also worked with Albane Cain of the
Institut National de Recherche Pédagogique in Paris and met Geneviève
Zarate at the Bureau pour l’Enseignement de la Langue et de la Civilisation
Françaises, also in Paris. I invited Genevieve to be my partner in respond-
ing to the Council of Europe’s request. Subsequently I was invited to spend
a few months in Washington, DC at the National Foreign Language
Centre, where I wrote almost the whole of the fi rst edition of this
monograph.
Other people have helped me throughout all this. Pat Allatt, although
not a linguist, saw the possibility of developing the empirical project and
taught me a lot about designing and running projects. Joe Sheils, Johanna
Panthier, Philia Thalgott and Christopher Reynolds at the Council of
Europe encouraged me in my work there and became good friends over
many years. Martyn Barrett began to work with the Council of Europe
and brought his psychologist’s way of thinking which opened new vistas
for me; Martyn too became a good friend.
This is, however, not a list of acknowledgements, as that has been
done at the beginning. It is a reflection and afterthoughts about academic
writing, and it is the link with the Council of Europe which is central to
this. For, although the School of Education in Durham was a good place
to teach and research, it was the stimulus of working at the European level
and meeting a wide range of pleasant and intelligent – and I do not hesi-
tate to use the word – people which was crucial for me from the 1990s
until today. It is all the more that I regret that the Language Policy Division
has now disappeared. It had a unique way of working which gave space
for ideas but a space which was always connected directly with policy and
practice. The space was both metaphorical and real since workshops took
place not just in Strasbourg but throughout Europe, which in turn ensured
meeting people with many different ways of thinking about languages and
language teaching.
The space was also flexible and from the early 2000s, when I had
become an adviser to the Language Policy Unit with Jean-Claude Beacco,
we changed the focus from modern foreign languages to all languages,
including fi rst languages/languages of schooling. Once that project was
well launched I ‘retired’ from my position and continued only with the
Autobiography of Intercultural Encounters, with the intention that it
would be the last thing I would do. Then I was invited to become part of
the group which would write a new ‘framework’ for intercultural compe-
tence and democratic citizenship, modelled on the CEFR and, in a sense,
carrying on the attempt to deal systematically with interculturality in
ways that the CEFR had not manged to do. The eventual publication of
Conclusion 155

the Reference Framework of Competences for Democratic Culture


(RFCDC) became a major, ‘flagship’ project of the Council of Europe, of
which I am sure John Trim would have approved.
The impact of all that on my academic writing can in some ways be
traced quite clearly, from the first request to write for the CEFR team, to
further documents, often written with Jean-Claude Beacco, over the fol-
lowing two decades, and later with the RFCDC group. Yet there are many
other influences which cannot be traced; they are just there. In one of his
interviews, John Trim said that when he was beginning his academic
career, one just read everything that others had written and then wrote
one’s own text, without attempting to give references; the CEFR was orig-
inally written in this way, with no list of references. Pressures of contem-
porary academe require references and these were later added as a
bibliography of relevant books and articles. Yet it was surely not exhaus-
tive and could never be.
It seems today impossible to read ‘everything’, since there is so much
written. Yet, although I was a generation behind John Trim, it was pos-
sible to do so in the 1960s when I did research on bilingualism. There were
just three or four authors – Fishman, Weinreich, Jones and Haugen – and
after that one was free to think for oneself. My PhD thesis, on a different
topic, had a bibliography of less than two pages. Today students have to
read for months and months and often feel anxious if there is not much to
read. Yet it should be a liberation to be able to work things out for oneself,
and this was indeed my experience when writing this monograph. The
National Foreign Language Centre had no library of its own and, although
I could go to Georgetown University, it was a similar liberation to just
write and then ask colleagues – and here I again acknowledge the help
from Mimi Met and Ross Steele – to comment, and then keep writing.
Adding references, to suit the contemporary mode, came later, and I hope
will be useful for readers. The liberation of reading little and simply work-
ing things out is, however, a pleasure I recommend.

Note
(1) There are of course many other lingua francas, but it is interesting to note that
Holmes and Dervin, having planned a book on lingua francas and interculturality,
say that ‘we attracted very few contributions that dealt with lingua francas other than
English’ despite the world being ‘full of others’ (Holmes & Dervin, 2016: 1).

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