Metaphors We "Language" By

In recent decades, language education research has broadened its scope to examine personal perceptions of language(s), and different methodological approaches have developed to give voice to these perceptions. Seeing our relationship to language learning as an ever-evolving project of engagement (an autobiographical identity project) helps us to think differently about what motivates people to learn languages. First-person perspectives also highlight cultural patterns in our perceptions of different languages, and how these perceptions are shaped by politics and ideology. One way to challenge the view of languages as fixed or discrete systems is to look at how people use metaphors to describe and understand languages and their learning of them. In this article, I draw on Kramsch’s (2009) concept of the multilingual subject to offer a personal reflection on how my own view of learning has changed, namely from seeing it as a process of individual skill building to understanding learning as something shaped by emotions, relationships, and personal and cultural narratives that unfold over time. This framing of subjectivity encourages us to see “language” as a verb, a form of social practice that is ever shifting and shaping our ways of being in and acting on the world.