English Language Teaching in its Social Context

LANGUAGE ACQUISITION OR LANGUAGE SOCIALISATION? 113Some problems with the model of SLSSLS as an apprenticeship modelSLS can be seen as an apprenticeship model. The learner ovcr time participates in theinteractional lifc of the new community and is gradually inducted into what arc taken to bcits pre-existing discourses. Such a model implies a ‘learning by doing’ approach in which,for example, the adult minority worker learns from her interactions with her supervisorhow to evaluate her role in dealing with complaints about quality (Clyne, 1995). Thislearning is part of what Rogoff (1 984) calls “the social orchestration of thinking throughcultural institutions and normative techniques of problem solving” (p. 5). But socialisationis more than cognitive learning in social contexts. It assumes a process of ‘belonging’, ofbeing part of the ‘new community’. And this is wherc the notion of SLS runs into difficultiessince it “assumes that groups are sociocultural totalities and that people eventually arrive atan endpoint of expert belonging” (Rampton, 1995b, p. 487).The apprenticeship model of SLS is, therefore, only part of the story. It does not fullytake account of the rclationship between the discourses to which learners arc exposed andthe learners themselves. In other words it is an overly functionalist model. It underplaysthe total role and self identity involved in learning and using a new discourse and theconstructed nature of intercultural contact in plural and fragmented societies.So, it is not possible to talk unproblematically of socialisation through language as themeans of developing sociocultural knowledge as if thcre is a stable body of such knowledge.The idea of gradually being inducted into a community’s pre-existing discourses suggests asimple, functional model which does not accord with our data of naturally occurringintercultural encounters. In other words, such events are not simply opportunities for thetransmission, however indirectly, of the necessary socio-cultural knowledge, but they aresites where social identities are constructed, where the interactants arc positioned andposition themselves. Pcople speak from within a particular discursive formation. In the caseof minority workers, this includes the discourses of cthnic and class position, the widerdiscourses of racism, their communicative competence and perceived competence and thclocal positioning which emerges from each interaction.Positioning in and through discourseThe detailed ways in which interactants position themselves and are positioned illuminatessome of the problems with an orthodox view of language socialisation. Different minorityworkers invest in interactions and in the process of language socialisation in different waysand are themselves defincd relatively differently.There are numerous examples of this positioning in the Second Language Ly AdultImmigrants project (Bremer et al., 1996; Perdue, 1993). A contrastive study of two Italianinformants in Britain who are enquiring about buying property in an estate agents (Robertsand Simonot, 1987) shows how they are positioned differently. One of Santo’s strategieswhich helps to maintain conversational involvement is to make general, evaluativecomments :Data Example 31 N: then you might get one for about fifty or sixty + or say forty eight sixty somethinglike that