English Language Teaching in its Social Context

aintoLANGUAGE ACQUISITION OR LANGUAGE SOCIALISATION? 109The transformation of many cities in Western and Northern Europe from monolingualto multilingual environments creates crucial sites for the study of second languagedevelopment. Adult minority workers who are struggling to make a new life for themselvesrepresent a particularly significant group when researchers are considering what constitutesthe domain for second language acquisition studies. For many of them, contact with thcmajority group is in institutional settings ~ at work or in bureaucratic encounters - andthese become the sites where their competence in the new language is put to the test.Thesesettings provide far from ideal conditions for language learning and yet they may be the onlyones where the new language is used at all. Charting the interactions and relative progressof this group in an indifferent and often hostile world drives the researcher to conccptualiseindividuals not simply as language learners but as social beings struggling to manage oftenconflicting goals. After all, the researcher may be interested in their language development,but the minority workers are concerned with getting things done. As Bourdieuasserts: “What speaks is not utterance, the language, but the whole social person” (Bourdieu,1977, p. 653). Lookmg at the ‘whole social person’ argues for a more holistic approach tosecond language development than orthodox SLA studies offers, both theoretically andmethodologically.Limits to a social perspective on SLAInteraction and pragmatics in SLAThere is of course an extensive literature on interaction studies in SLA which examinesthe conversational devices which foster certain linguistic features. In a more dialogicvein, recent Vygotskian approaches focus on the negotiation of ‘comprehensible input’ insocial interaction. But despite the concentration on collaborative dialogue, language is stillconceived of as a product to be acquired rather than as a discourse ~ social process ~which members of a community are socialised. Lcarners are now characterised as ‘sociallyconstituted’, as “responsible agents with dispositions to think and act in certain waysrooted in their discursive histories” (Lantolf and Pavlenko, 1995, p. 1 16) but the goal ofdialogic learning is still the ability to deploy linguistic phenomena. Methodologically,the analysis tends to focus on a particular feature of language rather than examine in depthlocal interpretations and reactions. Unsurprisingly, therefore, there is little or no ethnographicevidence to support conclusions drawn. The relatively new field of interlanguagepragmatics would seem to be a more promising area for looking at the whole social person.But despite its concern with contextual factors, it is the narrow concept of the learner andher capacity to rcalise specific speech acts which generate the key research questions. Theendeavour remains an essentially cognitive one as the authors’ recognition of the potentialsignificance of sociocultural issues implies:It would be a mistake to view developmental issues in ILP (interlanguage pragmatics)in purely cognitive terms because the strategies for linguistic action are so closely tiedto self-identity and social identity. (Kasper and Schmidt, 1996, p. 159)To date, however, these issues of social identity and, indeed, other social issues outside theimmediate contcxt of utterance, have not figured to any significant extent in interlanguagcpragmatics.Finally, the interaction and pragmatics studies in SLA literature continue the tendencyin SLA more generally to reify language so that French, English and so on are treated