Car Talk: The Deixis, Metonymy, and Imagined Communities Curated via America’s Bumper Stickers…and How to Leverage These for Deep L2 Teaching and Learning

This presentation examines three cognitive and linguistic phenomena (deixis, metonymy, and imagined communities) that are created and curated when individuals choose to place bumper stickers on the back of their cars and discusses how these can be used for deep L2 teaching and learning. When individuals choose to place a bumper sticker on their cars they are consciously making choices that establish their imagined identities in imagined communities, positioning themselves in relation to others in positive and negative ways, in degrees of closeness and contrast or distance, and are also at times unconsciously reifying messages about who they are, what groups they belong to, how they feel about others, etc. through metonymic relationships that they might not always be always aware of. I argue that meaningful L2 teaching and learning requires also understanding speakers’ motivation for language use, the intersection of identity and language learning, and the sociocultural aspects of target language use. Car talk provides evidence of all of these and an intimate snapshot into current U.S. culture.