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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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