Abstract
This chapter discusses the need for Second Language Acquisition to go beyond the purely linguistic in the communicative experience by bringing to the light the so far obscured dimensions of the personal and experiential in language learning. This chapter introduces a new theoretical kit to address this challenge, by drawing on philosophical thought that throws light on complex and rich understandings of the subject as a sentient, agentive and creative human being. In such a view, and in contrast to the linearity of more rationalistic approaches to the subject, language learning is seen as a way of applying a subversive stance on the self; of taking risks and multiple non-linear paths of development. Philosophical schools of thought, Romanticism, Aestheticism, Phenomenology and Nomadism, will be invoked in order to understand the subject as both a fractured self and as a subject in progress. It will be argued that by learning a new language, language learners do not only satisfy themselves by looking at the linguistic, but they also engage in heightened perception, myth-making and the challenging of their habitual intellectual surroundings and usual conventions.
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Solé, C.R.i. (2016). Lines of Thought. In: The Personal World of the Language Learner. Palgrave Pivot, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52853-7_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52853-7_3
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