English Language Teaching in its Social Context

unproblematically as homogenised ‘target languages’. This essentialising of a languageassumes that there is only one variety to be learned and that the language and communicativestyle of the broker’s yard or the baker’s is similar to that of the standard variety.A sociolinguistic perspective on SLAFrom a sociolinguistic point of view mainstream SLA studies remain asocial - the socialimport of learning to interact through language remains hidden. A sociolinguistic perspectivcshifts away from the linguistic system and from a concern with specific items of pragmaticand discourse developmcnt to looking at language as a set of norms, at languagediversity and ideologies. Specifically, this more holistic view is concerned with interactionas communicative practice and how such practice helps us to understand larger social forcesand, in turn, their impact on interactions. This connecting up the macro and the micro insociolinguistic theory gives due recognition to intcractions as sites where minority workersare not simply exposed to and able to negotiatc comprehensible input but are social actorsstruggling to get things done with their emergent competence in a second language.Rcconstituting learners as social actors brings into focus issues of social identity. Thereis a developing literature on language and social identity and its relation to SLA in whichapplied and sociolinguistics meet. Within this literature, the learner is understood as a personwith multiple identities, many of them contradictory. Identity is dynamic across time andplace and language usc, social identity and ethnicity are inextricably linked and understoodwithin larger social proccsses. For example, Pierce (1 995) discusses the personal and socialinvestmcnts in learning English as a sccond languagc among adult ethnic minority women,how these are observable in their interactions and the ways in which certain social identitiesare foregrounded or backgrounded. Once notions of social identity are called up, thcdominant tradition of SLA as an asocial phenomcnon is put into qucstion.Language socialisationOne response to the critique of the relatively asocial character of SLA is to suggest languagesocialisation as an alternative perspective. Thc concept was originally developed withinanthropology to describe the process whereby a child becomes an emcrgent member of thecommunity in which they are growing up. More rccently it has becn extended to includesecond language socialisation (SLS) (Duff, 1996). It includes both the socialisation requiredto use language in specific interactional sequenccs and the process of socialisation throughlanguagc - the indirect mcans of developing socio-cultural knowledge. Where SLA has usedmodelling and experimentation as the dominant paradigm to research how linguistic featurcsare attended to, stored and accessed, language socialisation studies have used participantobservation. Studies of adult minority workers based on naturally occurring language useprovide data that more nearly resembles child language socialisation studies. Such data canoffer insights into the SLS process provided that it is also supplemented by ethnographicdata on speech events and local histories and identities of participants.In the following example (from Bremcr et al., 1996, pp. 60-61) Marcello, an Italianworker in Germany, is being interviewcd by T, a counsellor in the Job Centre. Marcello wasone of the informants on the European Sciencc Foundation project on natural secondlanguagc acquisition. He had been in Heidelberg for about a year when this interview wastaped, having come to Germany as a real beginner. He was still seeking work and theinterview with the counsellor was both an opportunity to find out about work possibilities