English Language Teaching in its Social Context

LANGUAGE ACQUISITION OR LANGUAGE SOCIALISATION? 111and to use h s developing German. As an example of language socialisation, Marcello neededto be socialised into the specific genre of counselling interviews and use this interaction asan opportunity to develop his socio-cultural knowledge of how bureaucracies work, howwork is categorised, what the goals of such an interview are likely to be and so on:Data Example 112345678910M: wir muss vergessen T:M: jawe have to forgetja + gut + dann hatten wir die saache fur heutok good so we’re through for todayund wenn sie also in zukunft noch fragen haben kommen sie bei mir vorbei jaand $you have any questions in futureyou’ll look in okYesT: ok give me a call okM: so und jetzt muss ich gehenso and now I must goT: M: < > T: wicdersehenbyeM: wiedersehen dankebye thank youTranscription Conventions+ short pauseadditional comments on way of speahng etc.[ I overlap(XX.1inaudible or omitted wordAt one level, this could be construed as a simple case of pragmatic failure. Marcellofails to understand the pre-closing signals of T including “ja”,“gut” and “dann hatten wir diesache fur heut” and advice for the future. It is only with the non-verbal cues that Marcellorealises that they are in the middle of leave taking. His interpretive difficulty is not surprisingsince as Scarcella (1982) has argued conversational features such as greetings are acquiredbefore pre-closings. But this sequence is also an unusually explicit moment of languagesocialisation when at line 6 Marcello topicalises the act of departure.This is more than justa matter of picking up on some pre-closing signals, and it is worth mentioning here that thecrucial nonverbal signals which are part of the interactive environment arc rarely consideredin linguistic pragmatics.In order for Marcello to manage this type of institutional discourse and understandwhen, how, and why the encounter closes at a particular point, he needs to be socialisedinto the norms, role relationships and goals of ‘gatekecping’ encounters. Ethnographicevidence from minority workers’ experience of counselling interviews (Bremer et al., 1996;Gumperz, 1982~1, 1982,; Roberts et al., 1992) suggests that issues of speaker rights andresponsibilitics, expectations about specific goals and the boundaries of what constitutes