English Language Teaching in its Social Context

LANGUAGE ACQUISITION OR LANGUAGE SOCIALISATION? 117procedures, elucidating how participants use their interactional resources to maintain theinteraction and create a level of mutual interpretation. But Gumperz suggests CA is limitedin as far as the participants’ interpretations are seen as depending on sequential orderingrather than on active involvement. And this involvement rests on two key terms forGumperz: ‘conversational inference’ and ‘ contextualisation’.The capacity to understand interactions and be socialised into new communities ofpractice depends absolutely on some level of shared inferential processes. This does notmean that interlocutors share interpretive conclusions about the meaning of things but thatways of processing are sufficiently shared for them to engage with each other and be ableto undertake some level of ‘repair’. This is in no sense an absolute sharing since anyconclusions over meaning have to be accomplished, not taken for granted. And, as I havesuggested above, being competent is not a simple process of learning to manage institutionaldiscourse since it is just these institutional discourses which may position the minorityworker as resistant or at least ambiguous about the majority community.Nevertheless, the process of socialisation, however ambiguous, must rely on negotiatinglocal meanings through conversational inference. The question is: What is the relationshipbetween the linguistic signs that participants must process and conversational inference?Gumperz has proposed the notion of ‘contextualisation cues’ to account for how these signsare taken up by interactants. Contextualisation consists of:all activities by participants which make relevant, maintain, revise, cancel, any aspectof context which in turn is responsible for the interpretation of an utterance in itsparticular locus of occurrence. (Auer, 1992, p. 4)Contextualisation cues are defined as:constellations of surface features of message form . . . The means by which speakerssignal and listeners interpret what the activity is, how semantic content is to beunderstood and how each sentence relates to what precedes or follows. (Gumperz,1982a, p. 13 1)These cues serve to foreground or make salient a particular linguistic feature in relation toothers and so call up situated interpretations. So, for example, the job counsellor in DataExample 1 signals a preclosing sequence with the words ‘ok’ and ‘good’ both spoken withfalling intonation. These contextualisation cues routinely mark the closing of a particulartopic or ‘activity’ (Gumperz, 1982a) in an interaction.Contextualisation cues call up background knowledge which not only relates totraditional linguistic and pragmatic knowledge but to social relations, rights and obligations,linguistic ideologies and so on. In Ilhami’s case, mentioned above, the question about hisfather’s job within the speech event of an interview and occurring at that point in thesequence is expected to cue in information about social status. (See alsoTyler, 1995, on theinteractive negotiation of participant status.)Not only are contextualisation cues heavily charged with social and cultural freight, theways in which they invoke context mark them as problematic for the minority speaker.Levinson, in providing an analytic framework for contextualisation cues, makes theimportant point that message and context are not in opposition - the message can carrywith it or project the context (Levinson, 1997).This makes the process of coming to a levelof shared understanding, and learning from this experience, an extremely complex one.Levinson argues that contextualisation cues invoke context in particular ways. The cue is: