English Language Teaching in its Social Context
English Language Teaching in its Social Context
English Language Teaching in its Social Context
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LANGUAGE ACQUISITION OR LANGUAGE SOCIALISATION? 117procedures, elucidat<strong>in</strong>g how participants use their <strong>in</strong>teractional resources to ma<strong>in</strong>ta<strong>in</strong> the<strong>in</strong>teraction and create a level of mutual <strong>in</strong>terpretation. But Gumperz suggests CA is limited<strong>in</strong> as far as the participants’ <strong>in</strong>terpretations are seen as depend<strong>in</strong>g on sequential order<strong>in</strong>grather than on active <strong>in</strong>volvement. And this <strong>in</strong>volvement rests on two key terms forGumperz: ‘conversational <strong>in</strong>ference’ and ‘ contextualisation’.The capacity to understand <strong>in</strong>teractions and be socialised <strong>in</strong>to new communities ofpractice depends absolutely on some level of shared <strong>in</strong>ferential processes. This does notmean that <strong>in</strong>terlocutors share <strong>in</strong>terpretive conclusions about the mean<strong>in</strong>g of th<strong>in</strong>gs but thatways of process<strong>in</strong>g are sufficiently shared for them to engage with each other and be ableto undertake some level of ‘repair’. This is <strong>in</strong> no sense an absolute shar<strong>in</strong>g s<strong>in</strong>ce anyconclusions over mean<strong>in</strong>g have to be accomplished, not taken for granted. And, as I havesuggested above, be<strong>in</strong>g competent is not a simple process of learn<strong>in</strong>g to manage <strong>in</strong>stitutionaldiscourse s<strong>in</strong>ce it is just these <strong>in</strong>stitutional discourses which may position the m<strong>in</strong>orityworker as resistant or at least ambiguous about the majority community.Nevertheless, the process of socialisation, however ambiguous, must rely on negotiat<strong>in</strong>glocal mean<strong>in</strong>gs through conversational <strong>in</strong>ference. The question is: What is the relationshipbetween the l<strong>in</strong>guistic signs that participants must process and conversational <strong>in</strong>ference?Gumperz has proposed the notion of ‘contextualisation cues’ to account for how these signsare taken up by <strong>in</strong>teractants. <strong>Context</strong>ualisation consists of:all activities by participants which make relevant, ma<strong>in</strong>ta<strong>in</strong>, revise, cancel, any aspectof context which <strong>in</strong> turn is responsible for the <strong>in</strong>terpretation of an utterance <strong>in</strong> <strong>its</strong>particular locus of occurrence. (Auer, 1992, p. 4)<strong>Context</strong>ualisation cues are def<strong>in</strong>ed as:constellations of surface features of message form . . . The means by which speakerssignal and listeners <strong>in</strong>terpret 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 l<strong>in</strong>guistic feature <strong>in</strong> relation toothers and so call up situated <strong>in</strong>terpretations. So, for example, the job counsellor <strong>in</strong> DataExample 1 signals a preclos<strong>in</strong>g sequence with the words ‘ok’ and ‘good’ both spoken withfall<strong>in</strong>g <strong>in</strong>tonation. These contextualisation cues rout<strong>in</strong>ely mark the clos<strong>in</strong>g of a particulartopic or ‘activity’ (Gumperz, 1982a) <strong>in</strong> an <strong>in</strong>teraction.<strong>Context</strong>ualisation cues call up background knowledge which not only relates totraditional l<strong>in</strong>guistic and pragmatic knowledge but to social relations, rights and obligations,l<strong>in</strong>guistic ideologies and so on. In Ilhami’s case, mentioned above, the question about hisfather’s job with<strong>in</strong> the speech event of an <strong>in</strong>terview and occurr<strong>in</strong>g at that po<strong>in</strong>t <strong>in</strong> thesequence is expected to cue <strong>in</strong> <strong>in</strong>formation about social status. (See alsoTyler, 1995, on the<strong>in</strong>teractive negotiation of participant status.)Not only are contextualisation cues heavily charged with social and cultural freight, theways <strong>in</strong> which they <strong>in</strong>voke context mark them as problematic for the m<strong>in</strong>ority speaker.Lev<strong>in</strong>son, <strong>in</strong> provid<strong>in</strong>g an analytic framework for contextualisation cues, makes theimportant po<strong>in</strong>t that message and context are not <strong>in</strong> opposition - the message can carrywith it or project the context (Lev<strong>in</strong>son, 1997).This makes the process of com<strong>in</strong>g to a levelof shared understand<strong>in</strong>g, and learn<strong>in</strong>g from this experience, an extremely complex one.Lev<strong>in</strong>son argues that contextualisation cues <strong>in</strong>voke context <strong>in</strong> particular ways. The cue is: