English Language Teaching in its Social Context

Chapter 6Celia RobertsLANGUAGE ACQUISITION OR LANGUAGESOCIALISATION IN AND THROUGHDISCOURSE?Towavds a Redefinition of the Domainof SLAIntroductionVER THE LAST TWENTY YEARS SLA studies have not ignored issues of0 discoursc and the social context. But often the rcfcrcnces to social or socio-culturalcontext give it only a marginal role in the processes of language development. Equally, thereis relatively little concern with the social import of sccond language development. By ‘socialimport’ I mean the effect on social idcntitics, groups and relationships of the multitude ofintercultural interactions which take placc every day. 1 also include the effect of theseintercultural encounters on individuals ~ who are, themselves, part of these wider socialforccs.So, this paper is concerned with second language development and the immediate socialcontext in which individuals succeed, or fail, to construct local meaning together; with howthey connect it to wider knowledge sets and experiences and the social outcomes of this.It is also concerned with the wider social context. In particular, how social processes areconstituted in such interactions and how these processes in turn feed back into interculturalencounters and so providc the conditions (or not) for discourse production andinterpretation.Language socialisation rather than language acquisition better describes how learnerscome to produce and interpret discoursc anti how such learning is supported (or not) bythe assumptions of society at largc about multilingualism and second language learners.These issues are particularly salient when researching SLA with minority group workers.And hcrc, Gumperz’s notion of contextualisation illuminates the ways in which localunderstandings and misunderstandings have an effect both on thc immediate context forlearning and on the wider assumptions and ideologies about linguistic minority groupswhich also enter into and have an effect on local interactions and conditions for discoursedevelopment.