Conclusion: The Arts of Language Learning

Abstract

This book has proposed an understanding of the learners’ linguistic and cultural experience that challenges current paradigms in Second Language Acquisition. I have argued for the acknowledgement of a personal and nomadic world for the language learner which does not feed on exclusively subjective worlds, an imagined and symbolic sphere isolated and non-transferable to others, but on worlds that are built on the intersubjectivity of the social flow of human relations. In this understanding of the language learner’s world, the learner is no longer tied to a particular place on the map, a specific territory and named culture; instead he/she lays claim to a variety of cultures and different cultural formations, whether they are national, spiritual or artistic. Learners’ journeys of self-cultivation have been presented as real and imagined ‘movement’ and ‘travel’ through cultures and across learners’ history and desires for the future, whilst being non-transferable and invisible skills for those who do not experience them. Finally, this conclusion provides a manifesto that pledges a new way of looking and approaching language learning that provides an added dimension to the experience of learning a new language, whilst proposing a new identity for language learning. I set out an agenda that calls for the transformation of so called ‘language competences’ for ‘language arts’ which signals a shift of emphasis from the rational and transcendental to the aesthetic and personal.