English Language Teaching in its Social Context

LANGUAGE ACQUISITION OR LANGUAGE SOCIALISATION? 115for furthering his sociocultural competence are in place since his assertions are respondedto by Mrs B and the encounter ends with her agrecing to talk to the overlooker about herson.The contingent nature of such interactional positioning means that conditions for theproduction and interpretation of discourse vary from interaction to interaction. But theseconditions are also constrained by wider socio-political formations ~ such as the inequalitiesthat exist in a stratified multi-lingual society. So a model of second language socialisationneeds to include an understanding of the ideologies which feed into and are constructedout of interactions.Language practice and ideologyThe notion of language as ‘social practice’ helps us to see the ideological in interactions.There has been a lot of discussion around the term ‘practice’ in what has been called theNew Literacy Studies in Britain and the USA. ‘Practice’ or more usefully ‘practiccs’ aremore than action and events. In the case of literacy practices for example, they include boththe literacy event and the knowledge and assumptions about what this event is and whatgives it meaning. For example, what counts as literacy in a subgroup is determined by thosein dominant positions in a society. Literacy practices, therefore, are profoundly associatedwith identity and social position.The notion of ‘practice’ has also been used and debated in critical and anthropologicallinguistics as both action and the ideologies which surround it. Fairclough (1 992) makes thepoint that language practices are constructed not only out of sociocultural knowledge butout of the discourses which were produced earlier, are produccd in the interaction and insubsequent discourses. So, for example, within this critical perspective, questions have beenraised about taken for granted notions of what constitutes a speaker of a particular language.what is a non-native speaker, what certain groups count as ‘target language’ and so on.However, this problematising work, although it has influenced applied linguistics, has hadlittle influence within mainstream SLA. For example, the minority worker will bepositioned, by the linguistic ideologies that circulate, as a ‘non-native’ , ‘second languagespeaker’, ‘poor communicator’ and so on.These feed into the interaction itself and feed offit to recirculate in the wider discourses around language and cthnicity.Within the British tradition there are two competing sets of discourses around ethnicity.The first has been widely reflected in government policy and popular discourse. This tendsto essentialise ethnic groups, equate land, language and ethnicity and cast minority ethnicgroups as incompetent in English. (See Gilroy, 1987, for a discussion). In the Netherlands,van Dijk and his associates have traced similar processes in the discourses of elite groupswhich showhow cthnic belicfs are strategically expressed, acquired and distributed throughoutthe dominant group, that is as part of managing ethnic affairs and reproducing elitcpower and whitc group dominance. (Van Dijk et a/. , 1997, p. 165)An extreme example of this first set of discourses is from data gathered in multiethnicBritish workplaces during the late 1970s (Roberts et a!. , 1992). A supervisor was runningthrough a routine list of questions in English as part of a simple recruitment procedure.TheSouth Asian applicant had answered scveral questions about himself and his previous workexperience when he was asked “DO you speak English?” to which he replied, “What do youthink I’m talking to you in now!”The current discourse that was circulating at the time