Abstract
Affectivity is an important dimension in humans’ social and individual lives. It is either a stimulating or hindering aspect of language learning. This article aims to draw attention to material culture as a powerful, but mostly neglected source of data on the use and acquisition of languages, and demonstrates the close and intricate links between affectivity and material culture. It is hoped that revealing these interrelationships will assist in understanding and managing language diversity. It will allow practitioners and teachers to carry out social and private encounters, events and language teaching with more care, understanding and expertise. Researchers will be encouraged to join the investigation of yet one more important facet of multilingualism – material culture.
Highlights
Affectivity, a concept including “the state of being susceptible to emotional stimuli; a complex and usually strong subjective response, such as love or hate” (Affectivity, n.d.), has been discussed in relation to language teaching and learning, and studied as an important factor in the use of languages in society
Lazarus and Smith explain that “each positive emotion is said to be produced by a particular kind of appraised benefit, and each negative emotion by a particular kind of appraised harm” (p. 82)
Research on material culture is a novel development in multilingualism
Summary
Research on material culture is a novel development in multilingualism. While material culture has been a subject of study in ethnography and sociology, it is only recently that materialities have been introduced as a subject of interest in multilingual studies (Aronin & Ó Laoire, 2007, 2011). The rationale and theoretical premises for the study of material culture of multilingualism, as well as the main directions and priorities of such research have been suggested in the works of Aronin and Ó Laoire (2012a, 2012b) and Aronin and Singleton (2012). Studies in material culture can help us to understand how materialities create and modify multilingual reality, being instrumental in shaping and reshaping identities of both individuals and communities With this in mind, the material objects relevant for multilingual investigation and their types were identified (Aronin & Ó Laoire 2012a, 2012b; Aronin & Singleton, 2012). The crucial property of such objects is the relationship between verbal and material components This relationship is not always noticed, as human perception of artefacts of multilingual material culture blends their “thing” qualities such as form, size, substances they are made of, and their functions with the language constituent. Material culture of mobility: What (objects, traditions) survives geographical and identity transitions in an individual and in a group
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