English Language Teaching in its Social Context

~ (ed.)~ (1992)~~~ -120 CELIA ROBERTS- a number of questions have been raised about SLA and its relatively asocial perspective.Language socialisation better describes the process of being a social actor in a new languagebut in its orthodox form it does not fully account for the connection between microinteractional processes and the macro social issues. Wider discourses of racism, indifferenceand stratification feed into and off local interactional differences, misunderstandings andcovert or explicit opposition.The environments created by these social forces, at micro andmacro levels, produce complex and often hostile conditions for the understanding andproduction of discourse in a second language. Ry examining these conditions, it is possibleto begin to redefine the process of second language acquisition as second languagesocialisation but in so doing, questions are also raised about any orthodox SLS. Learning tobelong to a new community may also mean learning to resist, or at the least take up anambiguous position in relation to the socio-cultural knowledge and discourses whichconstitute it. As in many other theoretical and practical areas, the transformation of WesternEurope into a multilingual society illuminates the process of second language developmentand redefines its domain as centrally concerned with the social.AcknowledgementsMy thanks are due to Mike Baynham, Ben Rampton, Jo Arditty and MarieThkrkscVasscurfor comments on earlier drafts of this paper.ReferencesAuer, P. (1992) ‘Introduction: John Gumperz’s approach to contextualisation’, in Auer, P. & diLuzio, A. (eds) The contextualisotion oflanguage (pp. 1-37). Amsterdam: Benjamins.Bourdieu, P. (1977) Outline .fa theory ofpractice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Rremcr, K., Roberts, C., Vasseur, M., Simonet, M. and Breeder, P. (1996) Achievingunderstanding: Discourse in intercultural encounters. London: Longman.Clyne, M. (1994) Intercultural communication at work. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Duff, P. ( 1996) ‘Different languages, different practices: Socialization of discourse competencein dual-anguage school classrooms in Hungary’, in Bailey, K. and Nunan, D. (eds) Voicesfrom the language classroom: Qualitative research in second language education research(pp. 407433). New York: Cambridge University Press.Eermans, S., Prevignano, C. and Thibault, P. (eds) (1997) Discussing Communication Analysis 1:john]. Gumperz (pp. 6-23). Lausanne: Beta Press.Fairclough, N. (1992) Discourse and social change. Cambridge: Polity Press.Gilroy, P. (1987) There ain’t no black in the UnionJack. London: Hutchinson.Gumperz, J. (1982a) Discourse strategies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.(1982b) Language and social identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.‘Contextualisation and understanding’, in Duranti, A. and Goodwin, C. (eds)Rethinking Context: Language as an interactive phenomenon (pp. 229-252). Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.(1997) ‘A discussion with John J. Gumperz’ (discussants: C. Prevignano and A. di Luzio),in Eerdmans, S., Prevignano, C. andThibault, P. (eds), pp. 6-23.Hall, S. (1988) ‘New ethnicities’, ICA Documents, 7, 27-31.Hewitt, R. (1986) White talk black talk. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Kasper, G. and Schmidt, R. (1996) ‘Developing issues in interlanguage pragmatics’. Studies inSecond Language Acquisition, 18, 149-163.