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Socio-linguistic context

in Language Revitalization: a

ReviewIntroduction

In this paper I will review a subset of the literature relating

to the emerging socio-linguistic approach to Second Language

Acquisition (SLA) and by extension Language Revitalization. I will

begin by looking at works contextualizing the current state of debate

surrounding socio-linguistic approaches to SLA in its historical

context, specifically works by Firth and Wagner (1997), Block (2003),

Gass (1998), and Lantolf (1996). Following this I will look at

specific aspects of SLA that socio-linguistic researches have

problematized, while mentioning some of the implications for

Indigenous Language Revitalization (ILR). This section draws primarily

on Block (2003), (Firth and Wagner (1997), Norton (2000), and He

(2008). I conclude by looking at possible (necessary) futures for

socio-linguistic research and practice in specific language

revitalization contexts.

Current debateA discussion of socio-cultural approaches to linguistics and

language revitalization cannot take place in a vacuum, though in at

least one respect, the veracity of that very statement is one of the

items under contention in the ongoing debate between cognitive and

social approaches to SLA over the past several decades. Although the

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debate over the significance of social and contextual orientations to

language learning was brought to the forefront with the publication of

Firth and Wagner’s 1997 publication of On Discourse, Communication, and (Some)

Fundamental Concepts in SLA Research, the origins of the debate extend much

further back. Firth and Wagner themselves discuss questions of the

existence of “normality” in terms of scientific or linguistic

theories/metaphors extending back through the nineties to the

conflicts between Hymes and Chomsky in the 1960s over the direction of

linguistics, going back and forth between Chomsky’s view of language

as an internal manifestation of the individual Cartesian mind, and

Hyme’s view of language as a social phenomenon acquired through social

interaction. Since the question of research agenda and methodology is

inseparable from the question of the nature of language, this conflict

has had serious implications. If “true” language, the “base-line” of

acquisition/communication, is a function of the mind and can be teased

apart by eliminating all context, then clinical study in a controlled

environment is key. This has led to the structured ESL classroom being

the center of a large body of SLA research. If on the other hand, in

the words of Larsen-Freeman (2007) language is “a structured network

of dynamic language-using patterns, stored in memory”, memories which

include a vast amount of context, then the proper approach to

language’s study is in the very context that is it and created it,

social interaction. Given the question ‘does language exist in the

vacuum of the mind, or does the mind itself not exist out of context’,

many researchers have gone with the embodied view of cognition,

leading to research into physical metaphors (????), and to the birth

of socio-linguistics, and socio-cultural approaches to second language

acquisition research.

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Part of what Firth and Wagner were responding to in their 1997

paper were calls to narrow the field of SLA through theory pruning, as

some SLA researchers (Long 1993) saw the extreme breadth of competing

theories as a danger to SLA’s chances of becoming a true science.

James Lantolf’s article SLA Theory Building: “Letting All the Flowers Bloom!” (a

direct response to Long’s statement regarding “wild-flowering” of

“rivalling” theories) directly confronts the question of what defines

an idea as a theory. Lantolf argues that every theory, regardless of its

dominance, is at its core a metaphor, and that any attempt at

mathematical purity is, in his terms, physics envy stemming from the

modernist enterprise searching for “reason, rationality, the

universal, idealism, objectivity, and the search for the truth” (pg

715). Firth and Wagner’s paper, in riding the wave of support for

alternative approaches, managed to appeal to a broad enough audience

to kick off a branch of SLA that might not have been able to gain

traction (and be well known enough to attract other researchers).

Looking at the ability of this field to gain traction twenty

years after Firth and Wagner’s paper, Larsen-Freeman (2007) suggests

that the very reason why Firth and Wagner’s paper was able to gain

acceptance at the time it did was because of the very ambiguity of its

wording. Using expressions such as “increased ‘emic’ (i.e.,

participant-relevant) sensitivity towards fundamental concepts” and

giving calls for a “broadening” of the database, or “enlarge the

ontological and empirical parameters of the field”, the authors appear

to be only pushing for a change in direction for the field. Their

refusal to openly choose between social and cognitive dimensions of second

language use and acquisition left open the apparent possibility of

non-overlapping magisterial, each side dealing with different

questions, simply with increased awareness of the other.

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Despite this ambiguity, even in their own paper, Firth and

Wagner must have been aware of the directness of their attack on

realism and the possibility of finding the “truth” of language by

declaring that even as language is a phenomenon of the individual, the

individual is a phenomenon of context. The uneasy division of roles

that appeared to exist between Chomskyan strands of research into

phenomena such as order of acquisition, child language-acquisition and

grammatical structures and those potentially separate socio-cultural

phenomena involving the impact of context on language acquisition, was

actually a wishful illusion that has since been shattered by the rise

of usage-based morphology (Bybee, 1985) and full usage and context

based models of language acquisition (Tomasello 2003, Abbot-Smith &

Tomasello, 2006) and by extension, of language itself. These theories,

by stating that “acquisition” is purely a function of “use,” represent

a direct invasion of what is generally viewed as the primary research

focus of cognitivist SLA, extending the social SLA primary research

focus, use, firmly over what was seen as a safe-from-attack domain.

The divide between what Larsen-Freeman labels as modernist and

postmodernist philosophical orientations is not likely to be bridged

any time soon; arguments between narrative/contextual views of

existence and idealized/decontextualized or platonistic views of a

true or higher reality have been a staple of philosophical debate back

through Nietzsche, much of the writings of Paul, and on back at least

to Plato’s own time in the fourth and fifth centuries BC. Solving it

within the field of SLA in the near future is likely an untenable

goal, and the growing division of SLA research into separate cognitive

and socio-linguistic fields, each with their own conferences and

events (as noted by Larsen-Freeman) is further evidence that this

division is likely to continue.

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Even as this debate continues, the field of socio-linguistics

has opened up the field for new research agendas that are more than

simply new perspectives on the same questions, they are new questions

entirely about new subjects. Indigenous Language revitalization in

particular is a field of study where the breadth of context necessary

for even the most minimal of applied research into ILR is a community,

placing a significant portion of ILR research necessarily within a

postmodernist socio-cultural paradigm, and by extension pulling

interconnected issues and fields in the same direction. Even as some

SLA research has drifted far enough away from mainstream cognitive SLA

for contrasts (other than of topic) to no longer be immediately

necessary, the primary way in which most writing on socio-linguistic

approaches to SLA has been structured is via problematizations of

categories and approaches within mainstream cognitivist linguistics.

In the following section I will present some of these specific

problematizations.

Problematizing SLAThe implications a paradigm shift has on the definition,

understanding and application of key terms within a field of research

is not sporadic. By necessity, the perspective from which each and

every concept is approached is changed. Given as it is both impossible

and unnecessary to re-describe each and every aspect of SLA, in the

section that follows I will present in brief several core concepts of

SLA research that have been systematically problematized by socio-

cultural linguists, as well as some ways in which these analyses have

implications for indigenous language revitalization practices. My

model in this will be David Block’s book “The Social Turn in Second

Language Acquisition”, a major work that first summarizes the history

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of SLA, and then outlining the ways in which socio-cultural theory has

begun to make its way into SLA research, and perhaps more

significantly, the ways in which it has not. Block presents socio-

cultural approaches to SLA by systematically problematizing key

concepts and methods prevalent in mainstream SLA, organizing the

presentation around the three letters that make up the SLA

abbreviation, with chapters focusing on the S, the L and the A of

Second Language Acquisition. Block shows how each broad aspect in turn

has suffered from an artificial narrowing of terms and how each aspect

of SLA research could be expanded to reflect a more nuanced reality. I

have chosen to largely follow Block’s thematic in the following

review, including Block’s major critiques along with the critiques of

other researchers. I will then expand on this contextual base by

looking at a range of other researchers looking specifically at

questions of context related to learner and community identity. I will

finish with research looking most directly at indigenous language

revitalization.

Second

What is meant by “Second” when we talk about the identity of a

second language speaker, the stereotypical subject of SLA research?

Block suggests that in using the term “Second” we unduly limit our

understanding of learner identities. Building on Firth and Wagner’s

(1997) critiques of the terms Native Speaker (NS) and Non-Native

Speaker (NNS), Block argues that the idealized situation of a

monolectal monolingual speaker of language A learning language B is an

incredible simplification for a number of reasons; Third Language

Acquisition is the norm in much of the world, and has been argued to

be a more complex activity than “Second” language acquisition, at

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least in terms of the depth of applicable and relevant context.

Bilingualism and multilingualism are also extremely common and further

cloud the language acquisition field. Furthermore, Block argues that

the extent to which anyone can be said to possess a single L1 is

further clouded by research suggesting that most people even within

their L1 slide between a selection of idiolects and modes of speaking

reflecting a wide variety of social meanings, as well as at times

grammatical/phonological/semantic shifts. All of these “non-standard”

situations, which when put together compose the majority of language

acquisition (and use) cases in the world, appear to be largely only

discussed in qualitative research, often of a biographical or

autobiographical nature, as SLA researchers either oversimplify

subject linguistic situations or even exclude such individuals from

research that is attempting to go beyond context and discover

acquisition universals. According to Block, as well as Firth and

Wagner (1997), no amount of objectivity will allow a researcher to

discover the “baseline” assumed by Gass (1998) that differentiates an

L2 speaker from an L1 speaker, at least not without appealing to

social context.

In further analyzing how researchers deal with learner context,

Block argues that researchers tend to define the context of SLA

largely in terms of time and place; learners are defined by their age,

and the age of acquisition, and then further defined by the physical

location of the learning going on – broadly grouped into “foreign

language”, “second language”, and “naturalistic”. Block again shows

how all of these categories are highly problematic; what can seem like

clear categories can become incredibly messy when looked at closer in

terms of varying social levels, varying attitudes towards the target

language, different community dynamics and so on. These varying

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dynamics can mean that assumptions such as the idea that L1 and L2

speakers work together to negotiate meaning may not always be true or

relevant, and that assumptions about increased or decreased

opportunity for language input/use in a given locational context can

be very wrong in either direction. Block suggests that these and other

problems are going to require SLA researchers to develop a much better

understanding of how learners contextualize themselves and their ever

changing identities in terms of language; of how they establish their

right to speak and their right to listen (as discussed by Norton,

2000). In other words, attempts to categorize learners and learning

contexts will be a failure if the goal of such categorization is

separation of experience (implicitly understood by Block to be the

basis of linguistic knowledge) from context.

In addition to these critiques, Block demonstrates that even

many studies that do record data beyond these basic categories of time

and place (by including information such as gender) simply include the

information, but then do nothing with it in terms of analysis, as if

by ignoring this data they demonstrate the belief that they can

eventually cut through the context in search of potential universals

of linguistic cognition and interaction. Block links this

methodological practice to biases in SLA research towards

psycholinguistic and scientific epistemologies, heavily influenced by,

as he says, behaviourism and Cartesian dualism with its mind/body

division. These same connections are drawn by Larsen-Freeman (2007),

who further defines the conflict as one between modernist and

postmodern epistemologies.

The importance of the application of these questions of context

to language revitalization in an indigenous context is readily

apparent, and in many ways mirrors the cultural divide proposed

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between indigenous and western worldviews outlined by writers such as

Thomas King’s The Truth about Stories (2003), or Margaret Kovach’s Indigenous

Methodologies (2009), a conflict echoed in my own work (McCreery, 2013)

and by elders who refuse to record with me until they know both the

context of data collection, as well as the purpose and means of

dissemination. Some of the primary questions that my reading on this

subject raises for me are as follows; what’s the impact of learner

relationships to their elders and teachers on acquisition? What’s the

impact of learner physical location (on reserve, off reserve, city) on

learning, both in terms of opportunities, and various affective

factors? What’s the impact of level of education, other language

learning, or a learner’s home situation? Most of my students are in

their thirties or older, up to their sixties, however the older

learners have had far more exposure to the language. What role does

age play, and how can I use an understanding of this to better

structure my classes and our overall language plans and goals? These

questions of learner position, age and identity (discussed more below)

are all things I must consider as I continue working in Bella Coola.

Language

Moving onto the “Language” component of SLA research, Block

recaps the history of the “what” researchers assume students/learners

are acquiring. He describes a progression from assumptions that

learners were learning morphology, syntax and phonology, with

communication primarily serving to reinforce the acquisition of these

components, on to the idea of communicative competence being the

driving goal of language learning. While acknowledging that this

represents an increased awareness of the role context plays in

determining what it is learners are acquiring, Block still criticizes

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SLA research, grouping his arguments around problematizing the idea of

communicative competence through problematizing “task” as a

description of a language use, and “negotiation for meaning” as a the

assumed purpose of “tasks”.

Block discusses research about how uses of language for things

like humour or other ludic functions get marginalized in SLA research,

especially the extent to which this type of conversation often happens

completely disconnected from referential/transactional communication.

He argues that we have to recognize that language learning takes place

in all types of language use, and spends some time discussing Holmes’

(2000) descriptions of the continuum of conversational purposes and

types/overlaps in the workplace. He continues people are involved in

communication related to these varied purposes, one of the concepts

used in SLA analysis is the idea of a search for meaning, and the idea

that when two people exchange words, there is a shared purpose of

conveying meaning, and the dialog functions as an act of negotiation.

Block suggests that meaning is again but one aspect of conversations,

and that many time negotiations of solidarity or support take first

place, and that for many second language learners, many of their day

to day conversations, especially of a public or official nature, are

with individuals who do not negotiate, and simply demand comprehension

or who use communication breakdowns themselves as a means of conveying

superiority or a lack of support.

Additional uses of language that Block discusses include

negotiations of face, public image, negotiation of independence and

worth, all of which boil down to questions of identity. Block finishes

discussing the aspects of language often studied by contrasting the

humanist/structuralist notions of “identity as unified, internally

completely coherent and uncontested, and stable over time” (79) with

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views that see identity as being multi-voiced, fluid, and in a

constant state of re-construction and re-shaping through interaction

with communities. Block suggests that in particular, the contextual

nature of identity, in particular the actual identities of

participants labeled as native speaker (NS) and non-native speaker

(NNS) and the impact of these roles on the purpose of language use

should play a bigger role in the analysis of SLA studies, and a bigger

role in the direction of research into developing an understanding of

SLA. Block argues that in defending current definitions of language,

researchers erect walls around current research directions, resulting

in either complacency or arrogance. Statements such as “yes, but

that’s not SLA” in regards to analyzing the roles and uses of language

need to be abandoned.

Acquisition

Looking at what is understood by “acquisition,” Block outlines

several critiques of the model that displaced behaviourism in SLA,

Information Processing (IP). The primary critique, raised by him as

well as others (Lachman et al. 1979)(Mandler 1985) is that IP is still

is based on mind-body dualism, simply that behaviourism focused on the

body, considering the mind out of reach, while IP is focused on the

mind, but views it through the same dualistic system. It is within

such a cognitive framework that Acquisition/Learning in SLA has been

defined. The second critique Block reviews is that both models,

behaviourism and IP have favoured laboratory based research over real-

world situations, based again on the modernist framework, and the

pursuit of “base-line” knowledge, or truth, this despite the strong

applied nature of the field.

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Block, writing in 2003, claims that critiques of information

processing are largely absent in SLA. By the 2007 publication of

responses to Firth and Wagner (cited by Block as the best articulated

pragmatic critique), there appear to be several strong critiques. For

example, Larsen-Freeman (2007) points out approaches from a

chaos/complexity theory point of view that look at language as a non-

reducible emergent system, with language using patterns stored along

with contexts of use. This builds on ongoing usage-based research by

Bybee (1985, later 2006), and ties directly in to usage-based models

of SLA such as those proposed by Tomasello (2003). Larsen-Freeman also

mentions dynamic systems theory and connectionism as models changing

how language, and specifically language acquisition, is understood.

She diplomatically states that while these approaches may not

reconcile the two world-views, the divide can be deconstructed, though

it appears that the divide will be deconstructed from the post-

modernist perspective. From the range of fields reviewed by Larsen-

Freeman it appears that critiques of IP are now common, at least

within the socio-linguistic SLA community.

One step further from an information processing/Cartesian view

of acquisition embodied in cognitive linguistics and questioned by the

above authors is sociocultural theory. I say one step further not

because the underlying assumptions are that different from those that

base usage-based models or connectionist models of cognition, but

because socio-cultural theory as envisioned by Vygotsky and as built

upon by writers such as Wertsch (1998), by viewing language as a

mediation tool used by the mind to interact between human beings and

the world of objects, events, and behaviour, naturally tends to push

the area of enquiry away from the nature of the tool, to the

creation/use of the tool. All language acquisition is conceptualized

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as being the result of mediated interaction and regulation between

people, with learning taking place in the Zone of Proximal Development

(ZPD), something that is not only located metaphorically between a

learners abilities and their immediate potential, but also appears to

be mentally situated within the mediated world created through

interaction. This socio-cultural approach is grouped under Activity

theory, which appears largely concerned with an understanding of how

human behaviour is to be understood, from motivation through several

stages through to surface behaviour.

Within this socio-cultural perspective, the metaphor of

acquisition is replaced by appropriation or prisvoyivanye, the

adoption of linguistic or behavioural tools, followed by truly making

it one’s own. Socio-cultural proponents such as Bhabha (1994) and

Holquist (1994) resist viewing this knowledge

appropriation/acquisition as taking place in the individual, and

instead insist that this knowledge, much as the interactions and

experiences that led to its development, is ‘living in the middle’,

neither in ‘other’ or ‘self’. As Block states, “appropriation is thus

not just the passing of the external to the internal; it is the

meeting of the external and the internal to form a synthesised new

state” (103). Bhabha himself is well known in the world of literary

analysis, where very similar concepts on the location of cultural are

prevalent. Ideas such as living in the margins, ‘the spaces in

between’ or Thomas King’s conceptualization of culture in the short

story ‘Borders’ (1993) all present a very interesting parallel thread

to the current discussion in the context of SLA. It is within this

socio-cultural context that Pavlenko and Lantolf discuss what they

term a participation metaphor for acquisition.

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In their article “Second Language Learning as Creation and the

(re)construction of selves” (2000) Pavlenko and Lantolf take on

specifically the question of what acquisition is through the

suggesting that the idea of acquisition of a language is but one

metaphor, one that needs to be supplemented by the concept of ongoing

participation in a language community. Drawing on various narrative

models of the self and of human experience, they suggest that from an

emic perspective, language learning is not so much about the

acquisition of phonology, syntax and morphology, but rather about the

learner’s entry into and participation with a given language

community. By looking at the language learning experience from the

perspective of the learner (as suggested by Firth and Wagner),

Pavlenko and Lantolf suggest that they can move away from a view of

the mind as “having” linguistic “knowledge”, to a view of learner

experience that is seen as doing language, as an ongoing act of

knowing in a participatory manner.

In order to explore this viewpoint, Pavlenko and Lantolf outline

narrative approaches to related fields, justifying the use of 1st

person narrative descriptions of language community transitions into

English on the part of various individuals from Eastern Europe. Among

the findings of their analysis is the idea that learners have the

capacity to control much of their own use of cultural

artifacts/linguistic tools; they can choose to pursue full fluency or

to reject it, an observation that implies acquisition is culturally

mediated. Additionally they outline what appears to be a shared

progression of language and identity loss and gain experienced by the

various participants/writers reviewed in this paper. All learners went

through stages of loss as they began the transition into belonging to

a new linguistic community. First learners began to lose their own

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linguistic identity. The sense of concrete connection between words

and objects eroded, learners native-language inner voice gradually

vanished, and learner first language skills eroded, even as learner

abilities to identify well-formed utterances decreased. Eventually,

the gap resulting from the loss of learner L1 inner voice was replaced

by a new L2 inner voice, which was slowly built through appropriating

the voices of the learner’s new linguistic and social environment in

order to (re)construct the learner’s identity, past, stories and sense

of self. Following this translation, the new identity continued to

grow and develop beyond the level of the replaced/supplemented L1

based identity.

What is language acquisition from the perspective of these

learners? Pavlenko and Lantolf point out that linguistic success has a

very different meaning within a participation metaphor – if a learner

has rebuilt an identity and an internal voice that allows them to

negotiate within the L2 language community, they are succeeding. The

inverse implication is also significant – a language learner with no

community will find it very difficult, in fact, impossible, to build a

social identity based around the speaking community, and a speaker not

allowed entry, for any number of reasons, will likewise find learning

almost impossible. This raises some very significant challenges to a

cognitive model’s ability to form the basis of a teaching practice. If

language acquisition is best seen as entry into a community, then it

is social factors such as community acceptance or lack of acceptance that

play the primary role in determining learner success or failure.

Rather than comparing teaching method A with teaching method B, socio-

cultural theory suggests that cultural education and social

empowerment may be the most effective tools in a language teacher’s

arsenal – or worse yet, that the most important tools might be beyond

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the reach of a language teacher. Alternatively, the tools which the

learner is appropriating, using, and making their own, are the purview

of the language community of practice.

In brief summary, Block (2003) and Lantolf and Pavlenko (2001)

view learners as situated active agents with a lifetime of experiences

and context who are able to evaluate all forms of incoming stimuli.

Within this view, even the term ‘acquisition’ becomes overly passive

and tends to be replaced by ‘learning’. Learning is not just

memorization and use of linguistic forms, it is about actively living

within the ‘third space’ between learners and those they are in

relation with. Within this paradigm, failure is often not a

deficiency, it can be a thought-out choice against participation for a

variety of valid reasons (Norton 2000). The learner’s emergent ability

as a speaker is contingent on and co-constructed with other

speakers/agents. Finally, learning is about the co-construction of

identity, either as a member of the target community, or as something

else.

Identity and heritage language contexts

Identity in particular is an issue that can potentially eclipse

many of the other questions of learner context. In this review,

questions of identity have come up in relation to how researchers view

learners. In my Masters Thesis Challenges and solutions in adult acquisition of Cree

as a second language (2013) I interviewed a range of adult second language

learners of Cree, and found (to my surprise at the time) that

questions of identity and affect were equal or more significant

challenges to learners than were resource-based obstacles. Learners

were learning largely motivated by identity, they were challenged

because of identity, and issues of identity often determined the

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availability of resources, both material and linguistic (for example,

many urban learners had the benefit of previous competent language

instruction in other languages). Questions of the importance of

identity is an issue that has been looked at extensively, and has the

potential to be the most practical avenue of research in terms of

benefit for learners.

In her book Identity and Language Learning: Gender, ethnicity and educational

change, (Norton, 2000) Bonny Norton takes an in-depth look at the role

of learner identity on acquisition or participation. Although this

book is deeply embedded within a study of the act of language

learning, its concern with the social context of the learners almost

makes it more of an anthropological study than a linguistic one, yet

the implications of her research for learners and teachers are more

readily apparent than those of much of the other research covered in

this review.

Norton begins her first chapter with the statement that since

practice in the target language is essential to learn a second

language, it is important for researchers and learners to “understand

how opportunities to practice speaking are socially structured in both

formal and informal sites of language learning” (Norton, 16). She then

analyzes this construction within the practice of learners’ changing

identities, with these identities being viewed as changing communal

constructs modeled largely as described above, using a Vygotskyan

socio-cultural framework. Norton then analyzes the experiences of

several female immigrants to Canada, looking at their language

choices, opportunities, practice and use in the context of their

changing identities as immigrants or as persons resisting an immigrant

identity. Norton in particular looks at questions of how other Anglo-

Canadians view these women, and how communities deem an individual

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‘worthy to speak’ or indeed even worth to be spoken to and how the

answers interact with learner identities to impact language learning

success.

As far as classroom implications, Norton found that the majority

of these women did not consider classroom learning to be central to

their relationship with the English language and the English

community. Courses were seen as being overly theoretical and not

enough practice, especially in the situation the women found

themselves in, having difficulty in penetrating English speaking

social groups. The implication was that teachers need to prepare

learners to speak the language outside the classroom, especially in

contexts where such language communities exist, and also to inform

students of opportunities. An equally important implication,

especially for language revitalization, is that other participants

likewise need to be aware of their own identities, identities

constructed in conjunction with other learners and teachers. All

participants need to be aware of the impact their ongoing construction

of identity impacts the relationships between learners, and

participants also need to be highly aware of how those relationships

can aid, or hinder and even block language learning.

While Norton looked at the situation for immigrant women, the

context surrounding heritage language learners is different yet. Agnes

Weiyun He in her paper Heritage Language Learning and Socialization (2008)

reviews a selection of research on heritage language learning (also

called “home language”, “mother tongue,” or “language maintenance.”

She goes over research regarding heritage language as a set of skills

– the question of what if any cognitive benefits heritage language

speakers have. She then looks at heritage languages as a “resource for

developing specific, multiple, and fluid discourse patterns, cultural

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values, identities, and communities,” – research taking place in a

socio-linguistic or socio-cultural framework. He uses a framework of

language socialization rather than language acquisition, a change that

not only situates linguistic abilities in a social context, but

clearly extends “language” to include not only use, but also knowledge

about appropriate use, about the appropriate linguistic/social

positions of various individuals, and about identity creation within a

language.

He builds on Norton, discussion learners’ varying “degrees of

investment across space and time” (Norton, 2000), demonstrating that

Heritage Language Learners (HLLs) have an incredibly wide range of

motivations, often competing motivations. There is language

competition, more complex linguistic positioning, questions of

relation to heritage communities, all in all a study of HL acquisition

allows us to “examine the construction of multiple yet

compatible/congruent identities” (He, 2008). Heritage learning takes

place across a much broader context than simply classroom learning as

well, including a large informal component. In contrast with the

situations described by Norton, the HLLs discussed by He have very

different power relationships to the cultures of both dominant and

heritage languages. Do HLLs have the same challenges participating in

the heritage culture as immigrant language learners? Have cultural

norms been translated into the dominant language? As He says, “a

single across-the-board principle that governs the influence of a

dominant language on a minority language is too general.” She also

observes that HL development exhibits great(er) variability regarding

orders and stages, supporting Block’s suggestions regarding the

standard view of the NNS as overly simplistic. These questions become

answerable only at a situation specific level, making generalizations

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difficult or not useful, yet the questions remain important for

learners.

As far as recommendations for teachers of heritage languages,

He’s review suggests several implications. One observation is that

language learners’ attitudes towards a heritage language directly

mirror attitudes towards a heritage community. Again, the development

of a strong and healthy community may be a necessary pre-requisite to

any successful heritage language education program (though the

existence of such a program can in and of itself support the creation

of such a community). He discusses levels of “ethnic identification”

which may help language teachers judge the interest levels of their

students. In what for me is her most thought-provoking statement, she

posits the “HL development is contingent upon the degree to which the

learner is able to construct continuity and coherence of identity in

multiple communicative and social worlds” (209). What does this mean

for situations where the ‘social world’ of the language is only

elderly individuals? I suspect that the necessity of actually creating

much of the social world for some language revitalization efforts may

present even more of a challenge than teaching the language, and is

likely an entire field of study on its own (or should be). One of the

only concrete observations given by He is that language learners,

especially HLLs, as a part of a pre-existing community, will

themselves influence the competencies and the language choices of

other members. This idea, if explained, can be a useful narrative for

students with only limited access to elders/speakers, by giving a

right to speak, an understanding that their conversations as speakers

are real and meaningful, as Norton argues is necessary.

Much of the discussion above regarding heritage language

education/maintenance/acquisition feels very different from the

McCreery 21

specific situations faced by various indigenous communities, and at

least some researchers are looking specifically at the context of

Native American/First Nations communities and language revitalization.

Teresa McCarty in her paper Native American Languages as Heritage Mother Tongues

begins by stating what should be obvious, suggesting that “Native

American languages [are] heritage mother tongues, which [are] a unique case

that does not fit conventional frameworks for mother tongue education”

(McCarty, 2008). McCarty outlines differences regarding mother tongue

education between immigrant and First Nations communities including

differences of interest in the language within the community. She

describes language revitalization workers very aptly, when she states

that her goal in this paper is to “recognize and valorise the efforts

of those who are fighting to reposition Indigenous languages, and the

rich local knowledges they embody, from the margins to the centre of

everyday life.” This recognition that language work is often more

involved in social attitudes than with language teaching is also a

statement of the breadth of challenges that must be consciously faced

by indigenous language revitalization workers within their own

communities.

Taking the discussion furtherDespite the direct relevance of McCarty’s (2008) discussion of

language revitalization efforts, her discussion still touch only a

fraction of the range of contexts facing language communities, and the

same can be said for other survey papers on ILR such as Hinton (2008).

These papers end up being surveys of language programs, talking about

contextual problems facing the programs. In addition to these

programs, there are hundreds of communities with little or no efforts

underway, often due to challenges that make even the programs listed

McCreery 22

by these researchers out of reach or ineffective. Nations with

dispersed or disparate communities such as the Métis face different

problems than geographically centered ones, urban communities face

different challenges than rural ones, yet at the same time can draw on

different physical, cultural and human resources. This reflects the

complexity of the situation; as stated by Basham & Fathman, “recent

scholarly work on language revitalization falls within the interstices

of education, anthropology and linguistics, recognising that any one

discipline on its own does not provide an adequate picture of

indigenous efforts to revitalise local languages” (2008). Not only has

scholarly work been done in a “piecemeal fashion rather than a

holistic approach that addresses the interconnections among language,

culture, politics, economics, and education” (Henze and Davis, 1999,

quoted from Basham and Fathman, 2008), but comparisons between various

situations have been narrowly focused (looking specifically and

language programs, or at political situations). At the other end of

the spectrum are recent dissertations and theses by language learners

themselves presenting specific situations in detail with detailed

analysis. The question this state of affairs raises in my mind is the

following: is it possible or desirable to create a body of research

analyzing the specific contextual situation of every variation of

language learning, or is there some other pragmatic/practical approach

to achieving the assumed goals of such an endeavour, giving language

workers the understanding they need to have the best chance of

success?

Given the rapidly growing awareness within socio-linguistic

studies of the importance and range of relevant context to SLA, and

the simultaneous constantly changing political and social environments

surrounding indigenous languages, it appears to me that we must

McCreery 23

eventually reach a position where the recognized goal of the

discipline is a comprehensive comparison of several hundred different

language community revitalization efforts, drawing on auto-

ethnographic work by a broad range of both teachers, political

figures, and learners (from a range of backgrounds, and including both

successful learners and a wide range of unsuccessful students). This

massive cross-comparison would likewise have to be supported by works

on the impact of varying affective factors, political and social

factors, techniques, resources of all kinds, and more, almost to the

point where all context was spelled out and analyzed in the context of

every other aspect. In short, the type of in-depth knowledge and

awareness of the ever-changing context of ILR that seems to be the

goal of researchers seems an impossible task, far beyond the scope of

efforts like Hinton’s The Green Book of Language Revitalization in Practice (2001)

or even encyclopaedia projects. However, within the context of the

apparent goals of socio-cultural linguistics and of cultural and

language revitalization and engagement, the recognition of the

impossibility of such a task does not appear to be a bad thing, in

that this recognition would force researchers to recognize that SLA

socio-linguistic research will always be a community of practice

first, and a body of knowledge second.

Given that one of the major functions of socio-linguistic

research has been the re-conceptualization of linguistic knowledge as

an emergent practice, rather than as a body of knowledge, it seems

appropriate that the same view be taken of academic SLA knowledge or

knowing. If the socio-cultural/linguistic research community views its

knowledge and its existence as likewise being an emergent body of

practice, the door is opened for clear conversations about how new

members to this community, be they language learners, teachers,

McCreery 24

community members, or academics, can be encouraged to speak, to

develop identities, and through their use of “language”, change and

mould the community to which they now belong to. Within this context,

the increasing body of research produced by SLA socio-linguistic

researchers becomes an ongoing cultural discussion to be preserved and

used by new members. Mentoring, person to person interaction, and

sharing become seen as of equal importance as publishing, and

publishing is evaluated within the context of the community of

practice it is designed to serve. Alternative forms of presentation of

research should become more prevalent, as should more community based

and community serving research.

A parallel step necessitated by the recognition of language

learning as a community practice is the inclusion of language learners

within these same conversations and communities of learners and

teachers. Disabusing learners of unrealistic expectations and

unhelpful views of what it is they are undertaking in choosing to

become part of a language community, while at the same time having

ongoing discussions about the purpose and nature of the language

learning/sharing community should have real impacts on learners with

effects reaching beyond the language classroom. These types of

conversations can put learners and language workers on the same page

regarding the relationship between the classroom and language, between

language use and community, family, and health, and have the potential

to significantly increase the extent to which students view themselves

as agents of their own linguistic identity rather than as powerless

students being (re)colonized by their own mother tongue.

Within my own experience in the field, I understand such a

vision to be already well in the process of becoming reality. I

increasingly see research into ILR being presented in more accessible

McCreery 25

methods. While researching radio and language revitalization, most of

the resulting sources have been web-based, and presented in a variety

of media. At the University of Victoria, research into community based

research practices have become a part of the curriculum for a range of

classes, and relationships between language teachers and researchers

are being cemented through workshops, conferences, and ongoing

collaborative work. This integration has been helped from the start by

the high percentage of linguists working with indigenous languages who

also have worked directly with revitalization. My first hope is that

this community can become or remain a supportive network for its

members, and ideally come to embody the practices it advocates. My

second hope is that the benefits coming to teachers and largely adult

learners currently taking part in this community, even if only in a

limited way, can be extended to younger language learners. Finally, I

hope that through consciously supporting language learning

communities, the necessity of describing each context in detail can by

supplanted by the existence of community networks themselves capable

of recognizing, discussing and reacting to the ever changing context

of indigenous language revitalization.

McCreery 26

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