English Language Teaching in its Social Context

of116 CELIA ROBERTSassumed that someone of South Asian background was unlikely to speak English and theevidence to the contrary did not appear to dent the supervisor’s certainty that here wasanother non-English speaker. We could speculate on the outcomes of such an encounter andthe possible tensions set up for the individual minority worker who both needs to becomea participating member of a new community but who is insultingly positioned by a memberof that community as a non-English speakcr.The second set of discourses stem from the British-based Cultural Studies and, inparticular, Hall’s (1988) notion of ‘new ethnicities’ and what Hewitt (1986) has called ‘localmultiracial vernaculars’. Recent research has shown the destabilisation of inheritedethnicities and the emergence of new ethnolinguistic identities which challenge theorthodox essentialist ideas of language and race (Gilroy, 1987; Hewitt, 1986; Rampton,1995a). This second set of discourses suggest that the process of second language socialisationis not a straightforward case of becoming communicatively competent within a fixedsociocultural group. It is rather a hybrid process of both learning to belong and yet remainingapart ~ having several social identities and affiliations to several languages (Pierce, 1995).And this in turn has an impact on the wider social formations which themselves determinewhat socialisation means.Contextualisation and wider social processesThe link between SLS and these wider social processes is well illustrated in Gumperz’sstudies and their recent formulation in Eermans et al. (1 997). As Levinson (1 997) in thesame volume asserts:it is the large-scale sociological effects of multitudes of small-scale interactions thatstill partially fuels his (Gumperz’s) preoccupations with conversations, most evidentperhaps in his concern with thc plight of the individual caught up in these large-scaleforces. (p. 24)Levinson captures here many of the elements central to a redefinition of second languageacquisition as a social phenomenon. The focus on the micro - the fine-grained detail ofconversations ~ is linked to the macro - the wider social processes where social networks,identities and relationships are structured and restructured. What is significant for aredefinition of SLA as part of this is the fact, as Gumperz asserts, that individuals are ‘caughtup in these large-scale forces’. So every encounter where there are language differences isboth an opportunity for language socialisation but also a site where identities andrelationships are played out through the dominant discourses of language and ethnicity,albeit within a conventionally respectful interpersonal framework. And this may be whyLevinson talks of the ‘plight’ of individuals since the kind of intercultural interactions thatroutinely occur in institutional settings are unequal encounters.Gumperz’s concern with the linguistic dimension of social action shows how aspectsof linguistic signalling and cultural and social background knowledge work together toproduce communicative involvement (or not) and outcomes at both individual and societallevels. His focus, therefore, in line with the discussion above is on communicative practice.In order to analysc these practices, Gumper7 draws on an eclectic bag of tools and, asLevinson ( 1997) suggests, there is none of the theoretical cleanliness in his approach whichcan be found in Conversation Analysis. Gumpcrz draws on pragmatic notions in hisinterpretive procedures but as part of a wider sociological interest. Similarly, he has beenmuch influenced by Conversation Analysis. Like CA his analysis focuses on members’