Trainer: Adrian Holliday

Abstract:
A reconstructed ethnographic narrative will be used to demonstrate how a newcomer from a foreign place, with an ostensibly different culture, overcomes an established discourse of inability and learns to capitalize on her own cultural resources to employ underlying universal cultural abilities. These abilities enable her not only to become competent in an ostensibly alien setting, but also to contribute positively to it, and indeed to enrich it. This case study will be used to reflect on what is needed and possible in the language teaching and learning scenario.

  Adrian Holliday is Professor of Applied Linguistics at Canterbury Christ Church University, where he supervises doctoral research in the critical sociology of language education and intercultural communication and is also the Head of the Graduate School. He got his MA and PhD at Lancaster University. He is author of Intercultural Communication, with Hyde and Kullman, Routledge, 2^nd edition, forthcoming, Doing and Writing Qualitative Research, 2^nd edition, Sage 2007, The Struggle to Teach English as an International Language, Oxford 2005, Appropriate Methodology and Social Context, Cambridge 1994.