English Language Teaching in its Social Context

Chapter 16Pauline GibbonsLEARNING A NEW REGISTER IN ASECOND LANGUAGEIntroductionOR STUDENTS WHO ARE LEARNING English as a second language in anF English medium school, English is both a target and medium of education: they are notonly learning the dominant language but they are lcarning in it and through it as well. Forthcse learners, the construction of curriculum knowledge must go hand in hand with thedevelopment of the second language.This chapter illustrates how such integration can be achieved. In it I argue that learners’current understandings of a curriculum topic, and their use of familiar ‘everyday’ languageto express these understandings, should be seen as the basis for the development of themore unfamiliar and academic registers of the school. I show how teacher-student talk,based on shared common experiences, leads to the development of new ways of meaning.I also suggest the usefulness of bringing together, for the purposes of classroom-basedresearch, bodies of knowledge which have rarely overlapped; second language acquisition(SLA) research, neo-Vygotskian socio-cultural approaches to teaching and learning, andsystemic functional linguistics (SFL)The context for the studyThe classroom from which the data derive is in an inner city school in Sydney. At the timeof the study, twenty three languages were spoken by the children in the school. The classconsisted of 30 children aged between 8-10, with all but two children in the class comingfrom homes where a language other than English was spoken. Many children had been bornin Australia but entered school with little English, others were first generation migrants,including two children who had arrived in Australia within the last year. Generally, suchchildren very quickly bccome adept at using English in face-to-face contexts, where theconversation relates to what is occurring around them. However, as Cummins (1 996),Collier (1989) and McKay et al. (1 997) have shown, children who appear ‘fluent’ in suchcontexts may still have difficulty in controlling the more written-like and subject specificregisters of school, because these more academic registers usually require a much longertimc for developmcnt.The focus of this paper is on thc learning of a more academic registerby students who are largely fluent in English in face-to-face, everyday communication.