Ten Moments in Symbolic Competence

Symbolic Competence (SC) has emerged as one of the key intellectual and critical contributions from Claire Kramsch’s five decades of published research so far, though we scholars and teachers still hesitate at times to apply it in our analyses of practical, multilingual settings. This essay takes the opportunity to reflect personally on the concept, and on how the complex features it illuminates in everyday life have shaped the author’s own formation in various dimensions. The piece takes as its particular inspiration Kramsch’s 2023 “Poetic Equivalence: Key to the Development of Symbolic Competence” as a model for self-reflection, historical contextualization, for its rigorous, fresh understanding of what “symbolic” does and doesn’t mean in everyday, multilingual life, and—to use a Kramschian turn of phrase—for articulating “why it matters.”