Social Learning Theories

Week 11

Tonight

• Intro to language socialization• Discussion Leads and questions• HW• Midterms

Introduction to Language Socialization (Duff & Talmy, 2011)

• What is language socialization?

What it is, focus

• a broad framework for understanding the development of linguistic, cultural, and communicative competence through interaction with others who are more knowledgeable or proficient.

• examining not only linguistic development, but also the other forms of knowledge that are learned in and through language.

What's the problem with seeing language as neutral?

• In contrast to a restricted and decontextualized view of language as a neutral transmitter of information

How is the social involved?

• Furthermore, learners socialize caregivers, teachers, and other “experts” into their identities and practices.

• Yet, for a variety of reasons, some L2 learners do not experience the same degrees of access or acceptance within their new discourse communities as their L1 counterparts do.

LS has this focus, but why?

• Language socialization research often pays more attention to the interactional and linguistic processes of socialization in real interactional time than to the systematic study of outcomes.

• That is because language socialization underscores the values being inculcated, the challenges facing learners and agents of socialization, and (although less so) the degree of success in learning such practices.

Why is socialization important?• After all, current mainstream SLA theory holds

that opportunities for appropriate input/intake, interaction, and output, plus feedback of particular types, are indispensable for SLA. Therefore, if students’ access to meaningful input is blocked or if they are provided insufficient or inhospitable opportunities to interact in significant ways, their language production will also be curtailed and their learning goals (plus their sense of themselves as people whose learning is valued and supported) will likely be negatively influenced.

Resistance• They may want to retain an identity that is

distinct from a particular (e.g., target language) community (e.g., Bronson & Watson-Gegeo, 2008),

• or for practical reasons they may be unwilling to straddle both (and perhaps other) community expectations and learning/performance demands simultaneously.

• Furthermore, they may feel conflicted about becoming fuller members in certain new L2-mediated social worlds.

Positioning

• From pages 104—105, what are some ways Ss are positioned, or position themselves, that negatively affect SLA?

• Thus, studies of the social conditions of learning and local classroom cultures can have a great bearing on students’ global possibilities for SLA, as well as their academic advancement and affective states, even if the details of, say, their L2 morphological development, question formation, or word order are not systematically tracked. If students are made to feel like outsiders and illegitimate users of a language, their prospects for longer-term language learning success are compromised

Textbooks and positioning

How does macro influences micro? Why did this happen?

• The systematic “error” correction reported by Friedman (2010) in the national language classrooms she studied in Ukraine, for example, did not represent random phonological or lexical deviations from the “pure” Ukrainian sought by—and actively socialized by—the teacher; rather, the forms that got corrected were phonologically or lexically Russian in origin, though often quite similar to the corresponding Ukrainian words.

• However, the Russian forms betrayed colonial (Russian-dominant) ideologies of nation, based on the Russian language that teachers were trying to eradicate in the post-Soviet era.

Research • Certainly, to qualify as “language socialization,” research

ought (ideally) to be ethnographic, document changes in language and other social practices, explain development in terms of socialization, and involve close analysis of a rich primary data record derived from participant observation, documents, and audio- and/or video-recordings, among other methods.

• Further, research that relies on data generated in interviews in language socialization (or any other approach to investigating SLA, either alternative or cognitivist), should have an adequately conceptualized theory of interview, that is, as a speech event into and through which interlocutors are socialized and positioned, and through which “content” is co-constructed.

Discussion Lead 1Watson-Gegeo (2004)

• What are the main assumptions/premises?• How do these assumptions differ from

traditional/cognitivist views?

Questions from Watson-Gegeo

Why might this matter?

• feminists add the additional and crucial insight that human bodies are not all the same.

What does that mean?

• all knowledge is situated

• comes the recognition of the importance of who gets to be the knowledge producers versus those who are only allowed or able to be knowledge consumers, and why there is so much power in the hands of those who control knowledge.

• Knowledge is political as well as cultural, and for this reason, research- ers must ask, who gets to represent whom

Why is it obsolete?

• the national panel stated that the nature versus nurture debate is thus "scientifically obsolete" (p. 3).

What are we learning and how?

• Instead, humans learn through interactions with the environment that change the connections in our biological brains

Why?

• Lave (1993) • "institutional arrangements for inculcating

knowledge are the necessary, special circumstances for learning”

What is the point here?

• In any situation, people will learn, even if what they learn is to fail, an all-too-common consequence of formal schooling.

Context shapes learning, what are some specific examples for each of

these?• SLA research has demonstrated that social

identities, roles, discourse patterns, and other aspects of context all affect the process of language learning…

• Lave and Wenger's (1991) formulation [LPP] speaks to the "relational interdependency of agent and world, activity, meaning, cognition, learning, and knowing," and emphasizes the inherently socially "situated negotiation and renegotiation of meaning in the world" (pp. 50-51).

• This perspective is important to focusing our attention on how learners are brought into or excluded from various activities that shape language learning.

Discussion Lead 2: Duff (2010)

Questions/notes

• Academic discourse is not just an entity but a social, cognitive, and rhetorical process and an accomplishment, a form of enculturation, social practice, positioning, representation, and stance-taking.

• the inaccessibility of academic discourse to novices is perhaps deliberate: It serves to perpetuate the distance between experts and novices to some extent, to the experts’ advantage

How is this different than Vygotsky’s ideas?

• language is learned through interactions with others who are more proficient in the language and its cultural practices and who provide novices explicit and (or) implicit mentoring or evidence about normative, appropriate uses of the language, and of the worldviews, ideologies, values, and identities of community members.

Why does this matter?

• examining some of the misconceptions often held about it, such as that so-called experts are necessarily good, competent socializers (e.g., good presenters, writers, mentors) or that the biggest challenge for students in academia is formal technical or academic written discourse rather than other more interpersonal forms of discourse and communication found in class discussions or other informal academic interactions

Entering cultures

• Mature English-speaking students entering English-medium higher education after some years of absence may experience “change, difficulty, crises of confidence, conflicts of identity, feelings of strangeness, the need to discover the rules of an unfamiliar “world” (Ivanic, 1998, p. 7).

How it happened• students’ discomfort is often not simply a

perception on their part• It is also coconstructed through interactions and

other social practices, by dominant power structures and prevailing discourses of exclusion, including gendered discourses

• they are positioned—by themselves, by others, and by their institutions—as capable (or incapable), as worthy, legitimate, showing potential for fuller participation or membership (or not), as insiders (or outsiders)

Link to other ideas?• instructors are more effective socializing• agents or mediators than others (Casanave & Li,

2008; Morita, 2004, 2009; S´eror, 2008; Zappa-Hollman, 2007a, 2007b).

• Those who are most successful not only display, but also make explicit, the values and practices implicit in the culture and provide novices with the language, skills, support, and opportunities they need to participate with growing competence in the new culture and its core activities

• Japanese undergraduate students in his yearlong study in Canada were often deeply disappointed, confused, or simply not helped by the comments on their assignments, which were illegible and incomprehensible to many students; but beyond that, comments were often negative, terse, global, and uninstructive. He also observed how students were sometimes positioned disadvantageously by the instructors’ comments (e.g., as nonnative speakers and writers), denying the students any sense of legitimacy in their courses—or any possibilities for other identities, such as successful writer or insightful scholar or someone with a strong background in the content area.

• the feedback provided was contingent on many other sociopolitical and socioeducational factors, such as the value and reward structures in place for teaching (as opposed to research) at the university, the instructors’ status and rank at the university, the number of students per course, the availability of teaching assistants, and other considerations, such as whether instructors felt qualified or obligated (able or willing) to assist students in their courses to become better writers (in both form and content) and whether students could locate good (peer) proofreaders or tutors. In some cases, it was reported, students received only a grade, but their articles were never returned. Opportunities for meaningful enculturation into written academic discourse were thus lost, to students’ great disappointment and detriment

Discussion Lead 3: Byon (2006)

• Certainly, to qualify as “language socialization,” research ought (ideally) to be ethnographic, document changes in language and other social practices, explain development in terms of socialization, and involve close analysis of a rich primary data record derived from participant observation, documents, and audio- and/or video-recordings, among other methods.

• This perspective is important to focusing our attention on how learners are brought into or excluded from various activities that shape language learning.

HW

• 12. Atkinson (2011) Ch 5, A conversation-analytic approach to second language acquisition

• Discussion lead: Wilkes-Gibbs (1997): Melissa• Discussion lead: Mondada & Pekarek-

Doehler (2004):Kyoung-ah Hong• Discussion lead: Seedhouse (2005):park sujin

Midterms

• Keep your paper; will turn in for final• Return your grade sheet today; take picture

for your records• Final:– Presentation (week 15), collect data final

beforehand– Response to comments– Paper due Saturday Dec. 15th

Feedback

• from a (second) language socialization perspective, social interaction with more proficient members of a particular community centrally mediates the development of both communicative competence and knowledge of the values, practices, identities, ideologies and stances of that community.