Table Of ContentSloganization in Language
Education Discourse
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Sloganization
in Language
Education
Discourse
Conceptual Thinking in the Age of
Academic Marketization
Edited by
Barbara Schmenk, Stephan
Breidbach and Lutz Küster
MULTILINGUAL MATTERS
Bristol • Blue Ridge Summit
DOI https://doi.org/10.21832/SCHMEN1862
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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Control Number: 2018026959
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
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ISBN-13: 978-1-78892-186-2 (hbk)
ISBN-13: 978-1-78892-185-5 (pbk)
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Contents
Contributors vii
1 Sloganization in Language Education Discourse: Introduction 1
Barbara Schmenk, Stephan Breidbach and Lutz Küster
2 We Innovators 19
David Gramling
3 The Only Turn Worth Watching in the 20th Century is Tina
Turner’s: How the Sloganization of Foreign Language Research
Can Impede the Furthering of Knowledge and Make Life
Diffi cult for Practitioners 42
Dietmar Rösler
4 Slo(w)ganization. Against the Constant Need for Re-inventing
the Discourse on Language Education: The Case of ‘Multiple
Intelligences’ 57
Gerhard Bach
5 Just Another Prefi x? From Inter- to Transcultural Foreign
Language Learning and Beyond 72
Britta Viebrock
6 On Common ‘Exposure’ and Expert ‘Input’ in Second
Language Education and Study Abroad 94
John L. Plews
7 What on Earth is ‘Language Commodifi cation’? 121
David Block
8 Superdiversity and Why It Isn’t: Refl ections on Terminological
Innovation and Academic Branding 142
Aneta Pavlenko
9 Sloganization: Yet Another Slogan? 169
Barbara Schmenk, Stephan Breidbach and Lutz Küster
Index 176
v
Contributors
Gerhard Bach is Professor Emeritus of TESOL methodology at the
University of Bremen, Germany. There he directed the Institute for
Foreign Language Learning and Multilingualism (Inform) and its inter-
national research branch and doctoral program (Langscape) until 2009.
He now works as an independent research consultant, focusing on career
planning, academic publishing and referrals. Gerhard has given keynote
presentations at international conferences in Canada, England, France,
Hong Kong, Ireland, Israel, Japan, Scotland and Spain. His numerous
books and articles in scientifi c journals relate to research interests in the
culture curriculum, CLIL methodology, theories of task-based learning,
student-centered classroom approaches, the pedagogy of multiliteracies
and empirical research methodologies.
David Block is ICREA Research Professor in Sociolinguistics at the
Universitat de Lleida (Spain). He has published on a variety of language-
related topics, which he examines drawing on scholarship in political
economy, sociology, anthropology, geography and education. He is author
of Second Language Identities (Continuum/Bloomsbury, 2007/2014),
Social Class in Applied Linguistics (Routledge, 2014) and Political
Economy and Sociolinguistics: Political Economy, Neoliberalism and
Social Class (Bloomsbury, 2018). At present David is writing Post-Truth,
Ignorance and Corrupt Discourses for Palgrave Macmillan. He is a
member of the Academy of the Social Sciences (UK) and editor of the
Routledge book series Language, Society and Political Economy.
Stephan Breidbach worked as a secondary school teacher of English as a
foreign language for several years. He received his PhD from the University
of Bremen before joining the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, where he
has worked as Professor of English Language Education and Pedagogy
since 2009. Stephan’s research interests include conceptualizations of lan-
guage education, content-and-language-integrated learning (CLIL), lan-
guage teacher identity and professional development. He also takes a
special interest in language education policies in transforming societies.
He is co-coordinator of Langscape together with Lutz Küster.
vii
viii Sloganization in Language Education Discourse
David Gramling researches primarily in applied linguistics, translation
studies and literary studies. With Chantelle Warner, he has edited the
interdisciplinary journal Critical Multilingualism Studies (cms.arizona.
edu) since 2012. He is the editor of the Translations section of Transgender
Studies Quarterly and writes regularly on queer approaches to translation
and multilingualism. With Aron Aji, he translates the work of the Turkish-
Kurdish poet Marathon Mungan. David’s monograph The Invention of
Monolingualism (Bloomsbury, 2016) won the Book Award of the
American Association for Applied Linguistics in 2018. He currently serves
as Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of German Studies at
the University of Arizona, where he is an Associate Professor.
Lutz Küster is Professor of Teaching Romance Languages and Literatures
at Humboldt-University of Berlin, Germany. He is co-coordinator of
Langscape, an international research network for the study of multilin-
gualism and language teaching methodology, co-editor of Fremdsprachen
Lehren und Lernen, a journal on topics in foreign language education,
and director of Klett Akademie für Fremdsprachendidaktik – Französisch.
Lutz’s main research areas are multiliteracies and education, intercultural
learning, identity and motivational aspects of foreign language learning,
and literary studies.
Aneta Pavlenko is Research Professor of Applied Linguistics at the
University of Oslo. Her research examines the relationship between mul-
tilingualism, cognition and emotions. She has testifi ed in court as an
expert in forensic linguistics, lectured widely in North America, Europe
and Asia, and authored more than a hundred articles and 10 books, the
most recent of which is The Bilingual Mind: And What it Tells us about
Language and Thought (Cambridge University Press, 2014). Aneta is
former President of the American Association for Applied Linguistics and
winner of the 2006 BAAL Book of the Year Award and the 2009 TESOL
Award for Distinguished Research.
John L. Plews is Professor of German at Saint Mary’s University, Halifax,
Canada, and Director of the Canadian Summer School in Germany. He
earned a PhD in German literatures, languages and linguistics and a PhD
in secondary education, both from the University of Alberta. His recent
co-edited books include Second Language Study Abroad Programming,
Pedagogy, and Participant Engagement (with K. Misfeldt, Palgrave
Macmillan, 2018), Translation and Translating in German Studies (with
D. Spokiene, WLU Press, 2016) and Traditions and Transitions: Curricula
for German Studies (with B. Schmenk, WLU Press, 2013). John researches
second language curriculum and teaching, learner identities and study
abroad.
Contributors ix
Dietmar Rösler studied at the FU Berlin (German and media studies),
where he was later awarded a PhD. He worked as a junior member of staff
in the German departments of University College Dublin and the Freie
Universität Berlin and as Reader in the German department of King’s
College, University of London. In 1996, he was appointed Professor at
Giessen University, where he was responsible for two postgraduate degree
courses on German as a foreign language and on foreign language learn-
ing and language technology. In 2017, Dietmar was awarded the Otto-
Behaghel Senior Professorship by Gießen University. His main research
areas are intercultural learning, learning material design and the role of
new media in foreign language learning.
Barbara Schmenk is Professor of German/Applied Linguistics at the
University of Waterloo, Canada. She taught at high schools in Germany
and at Clemson University, Trinity College Dublin and Ruhr-Universität
Bochum. Barbara’s research publications include books and articles on
gender and language, learner autonomy, governmentality and language
education, conceptions of cultural learning, drama in education and
teacher cognition.
Britta Viebrock is Professor of TEFL Theory and Methodology and Dean
of the Faculty of Modern Languages at the University of Frankfurt/Main,
Germany. Her research interests include content and language integrated
learning (CLIL), inter- and transcultural learning, digital und multimodal
literacies, fi lm in English language teaching, teacher professionalism and
qualitative research methodology as well as research ethics. Britta has
published several books and numerous articles in these areas.
1 Sloganization in Language
Education Discourse:
Introduction
Barbara Schmenk, Stephan Breidbach and
Lutz Küster
Think diff erent. Just do it. Because you’re worth it. A diamond is forever.
Vorsprung durch Technik. Par amour du gout. La meta está en ti. Chi mi
ama mi segue. I’m lovin’ it. We are surrounded by slogans. They grab our
attention, they are memorable and they sell. Any successful marketing
strategy involves the development of a slogan, a tagline that captures the
attention of potential consumers. Slogans, according to the Entrepreneur
Small Business Encyclopedia, are ‘catch phrase(s) or small group(s) of
words that are combined in a special way to identify a product or company’
(Entrepreneur Media, 2017). As a linguistic packaging strategy, creating an
appealing and eff ective slogan is an essential part of product branding.
The emergence of slogans is by no means new. As Urdang and Robbins
(1984), in their collection of more than 6000 slogans, explain:
[t]hroughout history, as long as language has been employed in any form,
slogans have been formulated and promulgated. As a means of focusing
attention and exhorting to action they long have been and still remain
most eff ective; as an aspect of language they are illustrative of the inti-
mate relationship of thought, word, and deed. Although the word slogan
itself takes its origin from the Gaelic sluagh-ghairm ‘host-cry,’ a battle cry
of the Scottish clans, its meaning has broadened to include the catch-
words and phrases used by religious, political, and other groups. Recently,
we have witnessed a huge proliferation of slogans with commercial pur-
pose, saturating print and electronic media. (Urdang & Robbins, 1984:
17, emphasis in original)
More than 30 years after the publication of Urdang and Robbins’ collec-
tion of slogans, we are witnessing an ever-increasing need to marketize
almost every aspect of life, at an ever-increasing pace. The need to create
new slogans has become imperative in almost all sectors of society and
institutions, a development that seems inevitable in a world that is pre-
dominantly constructed in current neoliberal discourses as a marketplace
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