English Language Teaching in its Social Context

LANGUAGE ACQUISITION OR LANGUAGE SOCIALISATION? 119socio-cultural knowledge. Rather, it is a question of the struggle over meaning at manylevels. Any item produced by either side may lack stability and create new and confusingContexts. But there is also the struggle over meaning at a more macro socio-political level.Here it is a question of what counts as meaning. What does the gatekeeper have the right toknow? What counts as adequate and relevant evidence? On what basis will the applicantbe judged? What does ‘understanding’ the other’s intent mean in these contexts? Theuncertainty that inhabits these interactions is rapidly converted into the certainty of fixedjudgements and positions after the event since it is the gatekeeper who, as representativeof a major social institution, controls the way in which reality is represented and contributesto the dominant discourses about minority identities. And despite the respectful intcrpersonalconduct of the gatekeeper, minority workers, as I indicated above in the case ofAbdelmalek, are aware of the racism of the dominant group and this is likely to affect anyorthodox process of socialisation. Abdelmalek may be developing a Competence ininterpreting change of topic cues and even in understanding the goals of such counsellinginterviews. But the developing competence that results from such socio-cultural knowledgemay be matched by ambiguity, anomaly or resistance. Socialisation assumes a sense of‘belonging’ in a new community and yet the institutions where language socialisation cantake place represent what is different, ‘other’, cven hostile and discriminatory.The instability of meaning and the contestation over meaning create a complex set ofsocial conditions within which there is the potential for communicative and material successor not and the potential for language socialisation and the readiness for it ~ or not. Giventhe wider discourses that circulate about ethnic minorities, each intercultural interactioncan both produce relatively adverse conditions for language learning and can feed into thescwider discourses each time a misunderstanding remains unresolved.Some methodological implicationsThe connection between micro and macro in redefining the domain of SLA has methodologicalas well as theoretical implications. As several examples in this paper have shown,analysis of text, using a CA and interactional sociolinguistic approach, is essential inunderstanding the sequential ordering of interaction but it needs to be complemented byethnographic methods. Whereas CA is concerned with the general procedures employedby members in accomplishing interaction, a mcthod that will help analysts draw conclusionsabout online inferencing is also needed. In intercultural communication, the analyst needsto participate in the everyday routines of a particular group in order to undcrstandconventionaliscd ways of interpreting meaning.Ethnographic methods are also needed to understand interactants’ subjectivity (Bremeret al., 1996; Gumperz, 1982b; Pierce, 1995). Ethnographic interviews and regular participationin the lives of a particular subgroup contribute to the analysts’ understanding ofhow minority workers are positioned in encounters with the majority and the long-termeffect of this on individual motivation, personal and social investment and the constructionof social identities withn the relations of domination that characterise a multilingual society.ConclusionBy looking at the environment within which a particular group of people arc expected todevelop communicative competence ~ minority workers in a stratified multilingual society