This fully revised edition provides a comprehensive discussion of how insights and concepts from new materialism and posthumanism might be used in investigating second language learning and teaching in classrooms. Alongside the sociocultural and poststructural perspectives discussed in the first edition, this new book presents insights from new materialism on identity, second language learning and pedagogical practices. This application of new theory deepens our understanding of how minority language background children learn English in the context of their classrooms. The author comprehensively explains the new materiality perspectives and suggests how research from this perspective might provide new insights on second language learning and teaching in classrooms. The book is unique in analysing empirical classroom data from a sociocultural, but also a new materiality perspective, and has the potential to change our understandings of research and pedagogical practices.
This fully revised edition provides a comprehensive discussion of how insights and concepts from new materialism and posthumanism might be used in investigating second language learning and teaching in classrooms. Alongside the sociocultural and poststructural perspectives discussed in the first edition, this new book presents insights from new materialism on identity, second language learning and pedagogical practices. This application of new theory deepens our understanding of how minority language background children learn English in the context of their classrooms. The author comprehensively explains the new materiality perspectives and suggests how research from this perspective might provide new insights on second language learning and teaching in classrooms. The book is unique in analysing empirical classroom data from a sociocultural, but also a new materiality perspective, and has the potential to change our understandings of research and pedagogical practices.
Learning English at School: Identity, Socio-material Relations and Classroom Practice
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Learning English at School: Identity, Socio-material Relations and Classroom Practice
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Overview
This fully revised edition provides a comprehensive discussion of how insights and concepts from new materialism and posthumanism might be used in investigating second language learning and teaching in classrooms. Alongside the sociocultural and poststructural perspectives discussed in the first edition, this new book presents insights from new materialism on identity, second language learning and pedagogical practices. This application of new theory deepens our understanding of how minority language background children learn English in the context of their classrooms. The author comprehensively explains the new materiality perspectives and suggests how research from this perspective might provide new insights on second language learning and teaching in classrooms. The book is unique in analysing empirical classroom data from a sociocultural, but also a new materiality perspective, and has the potential to change our understandings of research and pedagogical practices.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781788920100 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Multilingual Matters Ltd. |
| Publication date: | 05/25/2018 |
| Series: | Bilingual Education & Bilingualism , #112 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 224 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Kelleen Toohey is Professor Emerita, Faculty of Education, Simon Fraser University, Canada. Her recent research focuses on socio-material perspectives on language learning with a particular focus on early childhood language education. She is a co-author of Disrupting Boundaries in Education and Research (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Collaborative Research in Multilingual Classrooms (Multilingual Matters, 2009) and co-editor, with Bonny Norton, of Critical Pedagogies and Language Learning (Cambridge University Press, 2004).
Kelleen Toohey is Professor Emerita, Faculty of Education, Simon Fraser University, Canada. Her recent research focuses on socio-material perspectives on language learning with a particular focus on early childhood language education. She is a co-author of Disrupting Boundaries in Education and Research (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Collaborative Research in Multilingual Classrooms (Multilingual Matters, 2009) and co-editor, with Bonny Norton, of Critical Pedagogies and Language Learning (Cambridge University Press, 2004).
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Framing Story: Theory, Setting and Methodology
When language is systematically unavailable to some, it is important that we not limit our explanations to the traits of the persons involved; it is equally essential that we take into account the interactional circumstances that position the people in the world with a differential access to the common tongue. McDermott, 1993: 283
Educational researchers have commonly used the traits of learners to explain schooling outcomes and, as I observed in the Introduction, second language learning research has often taken learners' characteristics or traits as a central concern. McDermott argued that such a view is limited and that observers also need to pay attention to learners' positions and social relations (their 'interactional circumstances'). This chapter begins with a survey of past and more current psycholinguistically-oriented second language education research and goes on to describe socioculturally-oriented work before 2000 (when Learning English at School: Identity, Social Relations and Classroom Practice (LEaS) was first published) and since 2000. This is a brief review of both psycholinguistic and sociocultural research and focuses on a few representative studies, summarising how this research has traditionally and more contemporarily conceptualised language, learners and the processes of language learning. As such, this is a rather 'broad-strokes' history, and not reflective of nuances in particular scholars' work.
With respect to socioculturally-oriented work, I consider how language, learners and language learning have been, and are, conceptualised. I used a sociocultural perspective to develop the theoretical framework and methodology for the 2000 report of my study. In Chapter 2, I discuss how new materialist theory might augment psychological and sociological ways to think about language learning and teaching.
Language, Learners and Learning in Early Second Language Acquisition Research
The study of second language acquisition (SLA) developed rapidly in the 1970s1 and 1980s and continues today. Early research drew upon structuralist theories of language, often cited as originating with the work of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1966), who urged attention to the linguistic knowledge that allowed speakers/hearers to use and understand language's stable patterns and structures. From this perspective, actual instances of language usage were unpredictable and could be affected by memory lapses, fatigue, slips, errors, and so on, and thus were not seen as revealing of 'deep structure' patterns and therefore were of little interest in the scientific study of language. For structural linguists, languages were discrete, differentiated and rule-governed systems that were best represented through linguistic analysis. Structural linguistic analysis was seen as helpful in language education: 'pedagogic grammars' sequenced language rules in ways research had proven to be most accessible; learners' errors could be seen as evidence of incomplete or faulty acquisition of language's rules and could give educators guidance about what structures learners still needed to learn (Richards, 1974; Rutherford, 1980; Schachter & Celce-Murcia, 1977).
Learners in early SLA research were conceptualised as individuals with individual psychological characteristics and learning styles. Sampson (1989: 919) noted that from this perspective: 'Individuals are assumed to have personal ownership of the identities they possess, including all of their attributes ... as well as the outcomes of whatever achievements their particular abilities and motivations bring to them'. McNamee (1996) observed that most psychological researchers who accepted this notion of individual identities were concerned with finding (through careful and controlled observation) the basic structure or essence of individual identities. Learners' characteristics (age, intelligence, aptitude, motivation, learning styles, and so on) and their effects on internalisation of linguistic 'input' were the subject of several SLA studies (Bialystok, 1978; Skehan, 1991; Spada & Lightbown, 1993).
An early and influential study entitled The Good Language Learner (Naiman et al., 1978), building on earlier ideas of Rubin (1975), examined both the cognitive processes of language acquisition and how learner characteristics had effects on these processes. Naiman et al. (1978: 3) were interested in language learners' mental strategies ('perceiving, analyzing, classifying, relating, storing, receiving and constructing a language output'), as well as the relationships among the personalities, learning styles, motivations, and other (what were considered to be) individually owned characteristics of individual learners and their successful (or not) acquisition of second languages.
In a study of child second language learners, Wong Fillmore (1979: 221) looked for 'the combination of interests, inclinations, skills, temperament, needs and motivations' that distinguished good from poor second language learners, finding that individual motivation to identify with people who speak English was responsible for the differential rates of acquisition by the children in her study. Strong (1983: 255), in a later study of kindergarten English language learners (ELLs), found support for 'a relationship between aspects of sociability or outgoingness and natural communicative language skills'. Saville-Troike (1988) investigated relations between child ELLs' level of cognitive development, their social orientation and learning style and the quantity and quality of their private speech. All this work saw cognitive development, social orientation and learning style as internal aspects of individuals. However, little of this research considered how social relations among learners, as well as among learners and those who judge their performances, might affect their assessments of cognition, social adjustment and learning styles.
In addition to consideration of what individual learners bring to second language learning, early SLA research investigated second language learning processes. Dulay et al. (1982: 276) described the cognitive processes of language acquisition as those 'by which language learners gradually organise the language they hear, according to the rules they construct to understand and generate sentences'. Davis (1995: 428) argued that this psychological or mentalist model was 'designed to get at language learners' mental strategies in acquiring an L2'. A great deal of research on both child and adult SLA used data from learner productions and self-reflections to induce generalisations about learners' cognitive processes of organisation, rule construction and sentence generation (Dulay & Burt, 1974; Hakuta, 1974; Huang & Hatch, 1978). Through a focus initially on the systematicity of learner errors (Corder, 1967; Ravem, 1968; Richards, 1974; Selinker, 1972) and later on the systematicity of learner productions as a whole (Hatch, 1978; Schachter, 1988; Schachter & Celce-Murcia, 1977), SLA researchers investigated the processes by which adults and children internalised linguistic rules. With the discovery of a regular order in the acquisition of English grammatical morphemes by some second language learners, researchers hypothesised universal processes of language acquisition. Research on learner productions and the plotting of emergent grammars led to attempts to understand both how internalisation of linguistic knowledge occurred and how knowledge of these processes might be of practical, pedagogical benefit (Ellis, 1994; Larsen-Freeman & Long, 1991).
As in psychology, much language learning and teaching research of this type was experimental and, for example, might look for co-relations between measures of learners' motivations or their learning styles or their personalities, and their success in learning discrete aspects of target language structures. More linguistically-oriented work in the 1970s and 1980s, guided by concepts of structural linguistics, examined corpora of language-learner speech to determine, for example, if there was an invariant order of morpheme acquisition by learners of particular languages, or if grammatical, lexical or semantic errors could reveal systematic but flawed rule construction by learners. In the late 1990s, when the research for LEaS was under way, these were the dominant theoretical frames underlying SLA research. Since then, SLA research has changed considerably.
Educational psychologists Kirschner and Martin (2010: 4) argued that a prevailing view in much psychological scholarship in the 1970s–1990s was that persons are 'deeply interior, reflective and ruminating ... the infamous Cartesian self dwelling in splendid isolation from the world and others'. This view prevailed, they argued, despite a great deal of previous scholarship which had posited more relational views of how persons came to be, because of psychology's efforts to attain scientific credibility and to establish 'objectivist theories of knowledge ... operational definitions and quantified measurement' (Kirschner & Martin, 2010: 4). They pointed out, however, that since the 1970s, psychologists became increasingly interested in conceptions of persons as constructed by their sociocultural relations and activities, and in seeing such views as potentially more helpful in addressing many of the psychological, sociological and political problems of contemporary societies. What many have termed the 'social turn' (Block, 2003) has had important effects on more current studies of SLA.
In philosophy as well as in psychology, ethnomethodology, sociology, literary theory, poststructuralism and Marxist studies, in the mid-1990s, theorists were increasingly interested in sociality and subjectivity as rooted in language or discourse. In a review of 40 years of SLA research, Ortega (2013: 3–4) noted that the field now enjoys 'a remarkable epistemological diversity' as it shifted to go beyond the 'quantitative, cognitive, positivist epistemologies dominant in SLA until the mid-1990s' and beyond a preoccupation with idealised language structures (and idealised native speakers), to a focus on how learners actually use language and make meaning. Hall et al.
(2006: 226) described this usage view of language as 'dynamic constellations of linguistic resources, the shapes and meaning of which emerge from continual interaction between internal, domain-general cognitive constraints on the one hand and one's pragmatic pursuits in his or her everyday worlds on the other, that is, through language use'. Members of the Douglas Fir Group (2016: 19), who proposed a 'transdisciplinary framework for SLA in a multilingual world', also saw language as a resource and, inclusive of their diverse research commitments and interests, saw 'language use and learning as emergent, dynamic, unpredictable, open ended, and intersubjectively negotiated'. For them:
A new SLA must be imagined, one that can investigate the learning and teaching of additional languages across private and public, material and digital social contexts in a multilingual world. We propose that it begin with the social-local worlds of L2 learners and then pose the full range of relevant questions – from the neurobiological and cognitive micro levels to the macro levels of the sociocultural, educational, ideological, and socioemotional. (Douglas Fir Group, 2016: 20)
The transdisciplinary stance these authors advocate moves SLA research from exclusively psycholinguistic theories of second language learning to broader concerns with social interactions, social learning and learners' contexts. This stance has been informed by developments in sociocultural theory and research and I move now to a description of these. Readers interested in recent and more fulsome discussions of recent SLA research might consult Spada and Lightbown (2013), the 2017 Special Issue of Language Learning (Currents in Language Learning series: Experimental, Computational and Corpus-based Approaches to Language Learning) and Loewen and Sato (2017).
The Sociocultural/Discursive Turn
As communication scholar Angus (1998: n.p.) saw it, the sociocultural/ discursive turn in the social sciences was founded on 'the notion that social reality is constructed in and through language and that, consequently, the proper activity of philosophy and the human sciences is the investigation of language use in various settings as well as its wider theoretical implications'. From this perspective, critical investigation (or de-construction) of how people used language/discourse in social settings could reveal how knowledge was constructed and how knowledge and language could be instruments of power. Language structure was thus tied to language use, and was seen as a kind of doing or making and, in any event, as social activity. British linguist Austin (1962) examined speech acts that were aimed at action, that made things happen (like the words: 'I now open this new shopping mall'). While Austin was of the view that performative speech was a specific class of speech act, the notion of performativity was later generalised to all language use, as scholars recognised that all utterances were doing something in social worlds (Butler, 1997). The nature of these social worlds thus came to be seen as important in determining what certain words could mean/do, and sociocultural theorists drew on work that foregrounded social context. The following explains how language, learners and learning were conceptualised in socioculturally-oriented work, and then how these concepts have been taken up in second language education research.
Language, learning and learners in sociocultural theory
In the 1980s and 1990s, many psychologists interested in sociocultural theory (SCT) began to read the work of two early–mid 20th century scholars from the Soviet Union: literary critic Mikhail M. Bakhtin and psychologist Lev S. Vygotsky (Cole, 1996, 1998; Wertsch, 1991, 1998). Unlike structural linguists, Bakhtin (1981) believed in the importance of studying language use (utterances) situated in specific sociocultural contexts. With regard to context, he argued that understanding language use required attention not only to speakers' and listeners' contemporary and historical social positionings, but also to their past, present and future linguistic contexts. For him, language was situated in a 'chain of speech communication' of past, present and future utterances and discourses on the same and related topics. Thus, for him, utterances were 'dialogically' linked to one another.
Sociocultural psychologist Wertsch (1991) considered dialogicality – voices coming into contact – to be the most basic theoretical construct in Bakhtin's work. For Bakhtin, utterances were joint productions: speakers constructed their utterances on the basis of their interaction with listeners, in both actual and assumed communities. Interlocutors' social positions mattered, as did previous and future speakers' and hearers' positions; hence, 'finding a place' in the chain of speech communication was neither easy nor simple. Bakhtin spoke of the struggle for ownership of language, the need for speakers to wrest language from other people's mouths and intentions:
Words are, initially, the other's words, and at foremost, the mother's words. Gradually, these 'alien words' change, dialogically, to become one's 'own alien words' until they are transformed into 'one's own words'. (Bakhtin, 1984: 385, cited in Smolka et al., 1995: 18, their translation of Bakhtin)
The word in language is half someone else's. It becomes 'one's own' only when the speaker populates it with his own intention, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention. Prior to this moment of appropriation, the word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal language (it is not, after all, out of a dictionary that a speaker gets his words!) but rather it exists in other people's mouths, in other people's concrete contexts, serving other people's intentions: it is from there that one must take the word and make it one's own. (Bakhtin, 1981: 293–294)
For Bakhtin, individuals never create utterances on their own, either out of their individual psychological reality or through application of the rules of a syntactic system. Rather, he saw speakers 'trying on' other people's utterances, taking them from other people's mouths, appropriating these utterances and gradually (but not without conflict) directing these utterances to serve their needs and relay their meanings.
We come to know our native language – its lexical composition and grammatical structure – not from dictionaries and grammars but from concrete utterances which we hear and which we ourselves reproduce in live speech communication with people around us. We assimilate forms of language only in forms of utterances ... [They] enter our experience and consciousness together. (Bakhtin, 1986: 78)
Persons use their 'voices', when they enter the communicative chain, as they initially appropriate others' utterances and then bend these utterances to their own intentions. Dialogicality for Bakhtin is how speakers get past ventriloquation (using other people's language) in order to enter the communicative chain, for in finding words to answer another speaker's utterance, a person finds and expresses voice. How learners enter the communicative chain, or how they learn to use language, was also a central concern of Bakhtin's contemporary, L.S. Vygotsky.
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. Framing Story: Theory, Setting and Methodology
2. New Materialism and Language Learning
3. Kindergarten Stories
4. Constructing School Identities: Kindergarten
5. ‘Break Them Up, Take Them Away’: Practices in the Grade 1 Classroom
6. Discursive Practices in Grade 2: Language Arts Lessons
7. Appropriating Voices and Telling Stories
References
Index