[Edling] UCL Applied Linguistics Seminar - Sunee Vork Steffersen - 14th January 2019 - Distributed Language and Applied Linguistics: Interactivity, Enskillment, and the Harnessing of Temporality

Wed Dec 12 10:57:30 UTC 2018

UCL Applied Linguistics Seminar

UCL Centre for Applied Linguistics

Institute of Education, University College London

Distributed Language and Applied Linguistics:

Interactivity, Enskillment, and the Harnessing of Temporality

Sune Vork Steffensen, Professor, Ph.D.

Centre for Human Interactivity, University of Southern Denmark

17:30-18:30 Monday 14th January 2019

Nunn Hall, 20 Bedford Way, London WC1H 0AL

The past 10-15 years have witnessed the emergence of a “Distributed Language Perspective” (DLP) (Cowley, 2011; Steffensen, 2015). Drawing on integrational (Harris, 1981), dialogical (Linell, 2009), ecological (Gibson, 1979), and radical embodied (Chemero, 2011) tenets, DLP pursues a symbiotic view on language as both dynamical and symbolic (Rączaszek-Leonardi, 2011; Rączaszek-Leonardi & Scott Kelso, 2008). On that view, language has to be seen “as fully integrated with human existence” (Cowley, 2011), which implies a non-representational view on language (Kravchenko, 2007), as well as a perspective that does not reduce the research interest to language-in-communication (Steffensen & Harvey, 2018)

In this talk, I will illustrate how one can study the situated interplay between human agents and their environment. Starting from the key concept of interactivity (Harvey, Gahrn-Andersen, & Steffensen, 2016; Pedersen, 2015; Steffensen, 2013, 2016; Steffensen, Vallée-Tourangeau, & Vallée-Tourangeau, 2016), I illustrate a distributed perspective on language by focusing on examples from intercultural communication, cognitive problem-solving, and psychotherapy.

My focus is on how linguistic patterns are integrated in the situated and ecological behaviour of human agents. I illustrate how particular ecological outcomes are achieved through the harnessing of temporality: human agents constrain their here-and-now agency by exploiting stabilised, supra-individual patterns on longer timescales (including linguistic symbols and other sociocultural resources). On such a view, human action and agency are multi-scalar and multi-causal.

At the end of the lecture, I discuss the implications of a distributed perspective for applied linguistics. In the light of my three examples, I discuss the feasibility of a distributed perspective on applied linguistics, picking up on the cultural, cognitive, and transformational aspects of language learning. As a non-expert in language learning, I will discuss these topics in an exploratory and tentative way, inviting for further dialogue.

References

Chemero, A. (2011). Radical Embodied Cognitive Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Cowley, S. J. (Ed.) (2011). Distributed Language. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Gibson, J. J. (1979). The ecological approach to visual perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Harris, R. (1981). The Language Myth: London: Duckworth.

Harvey, M. I., Gahrn-Andersen, R., & Steffensen, S. V. (2016). Interactivity and enaction in human cognition. Constructivist Foundations, 11(2), 602-613.

Kravchenko, A. V. (2007). Essential properties of language, or, why language is not a code. Language Sciences, 29(5), 650-671. doi:DOI 10.1016/j.langsci.2007.01.004

Linell, P. (2009). Rethinking language, mind, and world dialogically: Interactional and contextual theories of human sense-making. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing.

Pedersen, S. B. (2015). The cognitive ecology of human errors in emergency medicine: an interactivity-based approach. (Ph.D.-afhandling), University of Southern Denmark, Odense.

Rączaszek-Leonardi, J. (2011). Symbols as constraints: The structuring role of dynamics and self-organization in natural language. In S. J. Cowley (Ed.), Distributed Language (pp. 161-184). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Rączaszek-Leonardi, J., & Scott Kelso, J. A. (2008). Reconciling symbolic and dynamic aspects of language: Toward a dynamic psycholinguistics. New Ideas in Psychology, 26(2), 193-207. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.newideapsych.2007.07.003

Steffensen, S. V. (2013). Human interactivity: Problem-solving, solution-probing and verbal patterns in the wild. In S. J. Cowley & F. Vallée-Tourangeau (Eds.), Cognition Beyond the Brain: Computation, Interactivity and Human Artifice (pp. 195-221). Dordrecht: Springer.

Steffensen, S. V. (2015). Distributed Language and Dialogism: notes on non-locality, sense-making and interactivity. Language Sciences, 50, 105-119. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.langsci.2015.01.004

Steffensen, S. V. (2016). Cognitive probatonics: Towards an ecological psychology of cognitive particulars. New Ideas in Psychology, 42, 29-38. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.newideapsych.2015.07.003

Steffensen, S. V., & Harvey, M. I. (2018). Ecological meaning, linguistic meaning, and interactivity. Cognitive Semiotics, 11(1).

Steffensen, S. V., Vallée-Tourangeau, F., & Vallée-Tourangeau, G. (2016). Cognitive events in a problem-solving task: a qualitative method for investigating interactivity in the 17 Animals problem. Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 28(1), 79-105. doi:10.1080/20445911.2015.1095193

Sune Vork Steffensen is Professor in Language, Interaction, and Cognition at the University of Southern Denmark. He is Director of the University’s Centre for Human Interactivity, and he is the Editor in Chief of the journal Language Sciences (published by Elsevier). He has edited five issues on ecological and distributed approaches to language and interaction, as well as 50 articles/chapters in journals and books. Currently, he is PI on the project 'Ecology of Psychotherapy: Integrating Cognition, Language, and Emotion.'

Free event, all welcome

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