English Language Teaching in its Social Context

118 CELIA ROBERTSa conventional reminder, like a knot in a handkerchief, where the content of the memois infcrcntially determined. Thus thc ‘CUC’ cannot bc said to cncode or dircctly invokcthe interpretive background, it’s simply a nudge to the inferential process . . . Theinterpretive process may be guided by general pragmatic principles of a Gricean sort,and thus be in many ways universal in character: but the ‘cues’ are anything butuniversal, indeed tending towards sub-cultural differentiation. (p. 29).There are several problems here for minority language speakers. Firstly, they have toidentify that thcrc is a CUC (for example a particular prosodic feature may have conventionalsignificance in one language or variety and not in another). Secondly, as Levinson (1997)suggests, the socio-cultural background is not directly invoked by a particular CUC. It setsoff the inferential process but unless interactants share interpretative procedures, there isno knowing what particular aspects of background knowledge may be called up. Thirdly,there is the fact that contextualisation cues arc reflexive. Language shapes context as muchas contcxt shapes language. So the majority and minority interlocutors may make differingsituated judgements both linguistically and contextually moment by momcnt in theinteraction: a misread prosodic cue can index a sct of pre-suppositions about speakerperspcctivc, for example, which creates a new interprctativc contcxt and sets the interactionon a different footing.These iqsues are central to an understanding of what it might mean to be socialised intoa second language.The meaning of contextualisation cues can only be learnt by the linguisticminority speaker if there is extended cxposurc to thc communicative practices of the groupor nctwork from which the majority languagc spcakcr comes.It is long-term exposurc to . . . communicative experience in institutionalisednctworks of relationship and not language or community membership as suchthat lics at thc root of shared culture and shared inferential practices. (Gumperz, 1997,p. 15)The need for this long cxposurc or immersion is that, as I have said, the relationshipbetween cue and context is indircct. Cues function relationally, that is in contrast to whathas not been said, just been said and so on (Gumperz, 1992). Also many of the formalproperties of contextualisation cues are difficult to process, for cxamplc aspects of prosody.Finally, they are about invoking context more than message and yet thc learner is orientatedtowards processing thc message. In sum, contextualisation cues are slippery featurcs.Equally important is thc fact that contextual cues arc indcxical markers of membcrshipof a particular group. Knowing how to use and intcrpret a particular cue mcans at least forthat interactional moment that you are a ‘belonger’. And in contrast, the failure to pickup on a cue not only creates misunderstanding but scts the minority linguistic speakerapart. She is not in that interactional moment an emergent member of the same communicativecommunity. As a result, small interactive differences can contribute to largesocial consequences both for the individual, for example, in failing to be allocated a houscor get a job and, in terms of the social order, feeding into the structuring of ethnic relationsin a multilingual society.Contextualisation, therefore, functions at the micro lcvel, both guiding (or not) minuteby minute interpretative processes and also indexes “those implicit values of relationalidentity and power that . . . go by the namc of culture” (Silverstein, 1992, p. 57) at thcmacro level. Local situated mcaning and wider ideological concerns are caught up togcther.It is not simply a case of pragmatic failure or evcn of socialisation into some stable body of