Categories used by language learners to describe their experience.

What is it about?

In encountering new cultural worlds and their communicative practices, language learners need to learn how to interpret what they hear and see around them; interpretation is shaped, among other things, by conceptual frames, or categories, and the very language used to describe experience. In intercultural encounters, categories framing experience often describe national of cultural features, sometimes problematically bordering stereotypifications. Experiences of mobility, increasing diversity and a heightened metapragmatic awareness among cosmopolitan learners make "national" categories ill-fitting. This study follows Hazel, a learner of Japanese with a rich and complex cultural background, over roughly thirty months straddling a period of study abroad to illustrate the delicate balancing involved in selecting suitable ways to understand and talk about her position and her journey, focusing on the political implications of such choices. Hazel’s recourse to the categories of ‘the West’ and ‘Asia’ illustrates how such terms can affect perceptions, and also how they can be recycled or modified to accommodate evolving intercultural understandings, allowing her to retain control of challenging experiences. This case study underscores how training to develop a critical awareness of these categories can assist in avoiding easy stereotypifications.

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