Abstract
This chapter describes language learners’ experiences of Second Language Acquisition and their cultural encounters invoking the notion of travel and nomadism. From the traditional search for utopian worlds and epiphanies of the life-long language learner, to the instrumental agendas of the package holiday tourist, the business traveller or the immigrant language learner. This chapter reframes the idea of ‘travelling’ through cultures as a completely different journey, one which will turn out to be a fertile trope for looking at language learners’ personal motives. Sometimes the language learner is compared to the romantic traveller who gains access to imaginary spaces of personal liberation; in other cases to a moral crusade or the development of new sensibilities. Above all, it argues that the language learning ‘passage’ can take a myriad of forms and shapes, from the ‘quick tourist encounter’, to the seeker of extreme experiences in the mysterious and the bizarre, to the long and arduous life journey. But the travelling I discuss here goes beyond the shortening of geographical distances to signal the complex web of personal stories and desires that are inscribed into particular language learners’ experiences and the idiosyncratic journeys into the self that can be identified.
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Solé, C.R.i. (2016). Life in a Caravan. In: The Personal World of the Language Learner. Palgrave Pivot, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52853-7_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52853-7_7
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