Sociolinguistics and SLA

Primarily based on Theories of SLL (Mitchell & Myles, 2004)

Variability in second language use

By variability, we refer to the fact that L2 learners commonly produce different versions of particular constructions, more or less close to the TL form, within a short time span (even, perhaps, within succeeding utterances). Sources of Variation in SLA Primarily based on Variation (Romaine, 2005) in The Handbook of SLA (Doughty & Long 2005) Variability can be systematic (i.e., rule-governed) and non-systematic (or free) variation not conditioned by any observable factors or governed by rule. Free Variation: e.g. No look my card. and Don't look my card. used interchangeably for the same function during an extended period of time. Systematic Variation: e.g. He eats turkey. and John eat turkey. used depending on whether the clause subject was a pronoun. Systematic variation can be of two types: Internal Variation (conditioned by linguistic factors): e.g. -t/d deletion depending on whether a word beginning with a vowel or a consonant follows (e.g., missed train v. missed Alice) or whether the final member of the cluster is the past tense morpheme (e.g., missed v. mist). External Variation (conditioned by social factors): e.g. more -t/d deletion in less formal styles than in formal ones (style) higher-status speakers deleting less often than lower-status ones (social class) African-Americans deleting more frequently than whites (ethnicity)

Explanations for Free Variation

Ellis (1999, p. 469) argues that free variation arises when learners acquire alternative lexical resources for encoding meanings, for which they already have communicative resources. The new devices are not integrated into the IL system, but instead are simply attached, loosely and additively, to an existing formfunction mapping. In time, these items will eventually gain differentiated social or pragmatic functions.

Explanations for Internal Variability

Markedness Speakers tend to simplify consonant clusters, presumably because sequences of consonants are more marked than a sequence of consonant followed by vowel. This constraint operates to maintain the preferred universal canonical syllable structure, CVC. In fact, deletion of -t/d in consonant clusters is normal in casual, non-standard speech throughout native-speaker varieties of English. A meaningful feature is more marked if it has no surface realization. Therefore, the final /t/ of mist is more likely to be deleted than the final /t/ of missed, which carries meaning. We can then predict that a phonological rule of deletion would tend not to operate across morpheme boundaries. Language Change Synchronic variation represents a stage in long-term language change. A new language rule may be implemented initially only in a particular linguistic environment, and can then spread step by step to other environments. Such a 'wave' model of language change has been used by some researchers to explain variability in learner interlanguage.

Gatbonton (1978) applied this dynamic model of language change the acquisition of English interdental fricatives [] and [] by French Canadian learners, who tend to substitute the equivalent stops. Her results show that new pronunciations move through learner interlanguage systems in a similar way to forms undergoing change in native-speaker varieties. Universal Developmental Constraints SLA is likely to share characteristics with pidginization and creolization. Comparisons of the learning of one TL by speakers of different NLs and the learning of different TLs by speakers of the same NL show little TL influence in the acquisition of major semantic domains, such as temporality. It seems that learners, in the early stages, create a system of communication rather than acquire specific TL features. Learners begin by using lexical means before proceeding to grammaticalized ones. Systematic morphological distinctions emerge rather late, if at all. For instance, although French has a grammaticalized aspectual distinction in the past, even advanced learners did not acquire it. This suggests that acquisition is dictated not by the TL, but by the constraints of the developing interlanguage system over time. Native Language Transfer A number of studies on the acquisition of the definite article in a range of European languages, by learners from different L1 backgrounds show that learners whose first language has an article system make faster progress than those without (e.g. Italian first language vs. Turkish first language learners of L2 German).

Explanations for External Variability

Style-Shifting Tarone (1988) has suggested that second language learners control a number of varieties of second language, ranging from a more pidgin-like style used in informal and unmonitored speech, to a more target-like careful style used in tasks with a focus on form. For example, Tarone's own work showed that both Japanese first language and Arabic first language learners of English as a second language supplied the third-person singular verb inflection -s more reliably in formal contexts. However, Romaine (2003) concludes from her survey that stylistic variation is relatively weak among L2 learners, and it is hard to relate attention or degree of monitoring (both psycholinguistic concepts) to the sociolinguistic concept of style. On the other hand, Ellis (2008) seems convinced that IL style-shifting can occur as a result of NL influence, stage of development, and difficulty of the target feature. But concurring with Romaine, Ellis is also critical of a Labovian style-shifting account of variability as he believes the nature of the link between attention and social factors the primary causative variables is particularly unclear in the case of L2 learners. Ellis (2008, p. 144) Gender Effect Both Ellis and Romaine seem to agree that female L2 learners tend to make more frequent use of prestigious or standard forms than male learners. Interlocutor Effect Age & Authority Relationships Speech Accommodation Theory Topic Generality, Familiarity, Learners Attitude (e.g. Expertness)

Acquiring Sociolinguistic Variation in Interlanguage

L2 learners may become sensitive to sociolinguistic variation in the target language, and may vary their usage patterns over time to accommodate increasingly to the norms of the target community. For instance, immersion students of French have been found to rarely or never use vernacular variants (i.e. the non-standard ones). However, they do make use of mildly marked variants, though at lower frequency than native speakers. Though, there is little hard evidence that beginning L2 learners control stylistic variation, it is clear that more advanced learners who engage actively with first language users move rapidly towards community norms of (mildly) informal usage.

Second Language Socialization

A five-year-old Moroccan girl, Fatma, attending an Italian nursery school (a setting full of fluid, multiparty talk), had to learn to take conversational turns, which were both relevant to the ongoing conversational topic and interesting to other participants. Her main early strategy was to repeat the utterances of others, or parts of them. In the beginning she simply joined in choral performances of activities like greeting or requesting. She began to make individual conversational contributions by appropriating words and phrases already produced by others, but adding minimal new elements, such as a negative expression: e.g. S1 [to the teacher]: Im cold. Fatma [later, to the teacher]: No no I cold. This, this no cold. Her turns include a mix of borrowed and new language, plus vigorous gestures, to make her point (that she is kept warm by her pullover). The topic is a here-and-now one, which can be supported by reference to the immediate context, and Fatma makes up to some extent for linguistic gaps by determined repetition. The small group setting and regular routines of the nursery school provide Fatma with guidance on how to become an accepted participant, and it is only after several months that she can engage in more open talk about non-present topics. In a classroom study with two adult L2 learners of Japanese, Ohta (1999) finds evidence for the role of L2 socialization in SLA. She found that teacher-led classroom interactional routines play a part in socializing learners into appropriate use of Japanese-style follow-up expressions (which show interlocutor interest and collaboration), and thus into the achievement of Japanese-style conversational alignment among interlocutors.

Communities of Practice and Situated SLA

A Brief Background Up until the 1990s, SLA researchers had been preoccupied with discovering the cognitive processes of language acquisition and the effects of learners characteristics on these processes. L2 learning, from this perspective, was the process by which individual learners (with certain characteristics) internalized language forms in interaction with available L2 input. SLA research was concerned with discovering how these individual learners managed their interactions with L2 input and organized their L2 output. In this way, language learning was described as mental processes such as perceiving, analyzing, classifying, relating, storing, retrieving, and constructing a language output. The situated experience of learners was not a focus of such research. Recently interest in sociological and anthropological aspects of SLA has been increasing, especially in terms of sociocultural theory. (Norton & Toohey 2001, Changing Perspectives on Good Language Learners, TESOL Quarterly 35(2), p. 310) Vygotsky is often seen as providing the basis for sociocultural approaches to learning with his emphasis on the importance of social contexts in processes of acculturation, whereby more experienced participants in a culture bring the intellectual tools of society within the reach of less experienced members. (This is

explained by the concepts of mediation, self-regulation, other-regulation, scaffolding, ZPD, and appropriation). The ability to participate as a competent member in the practices of a group (say speakers of another language) is learned through repeated engagement in and experience with these activities with more competent members of a group. ( practice and the presence of more experienced coparticipants) Fundamental to a sociocultural approach, then, is the assumption that learning and development occur as people participate in the sociocultural activities of their community. (Norton & Toohey 2001, p. 311) Communities of Practice The notion of community of practice has been proposed as a way to theorize and investigate social contexts. A definition for a community of practice is as follows: An aggregate of people who come together around mutual engagement in an endeavor. Ways of doing things, ways of talking, beliefs, values, power relations - in short, practices - emerge in the course of this mutual endeavor. As a social construct, a community of practice is different from the traditional community, primarily because it is defined simultaneously by its membership and by the practice in which that membership engages. (Eckhert and McConnell-Ginet, 1992, p. 464, cited in Mitchell & Myles, 2004, p. 241) Different individuals may be peripheral members or core members of a given community of practice. All may be engaged to different degrees in the joint enterprise, but they may have differential access to the repertoire of negotiable resources accumulated by the community. Learning itself is socially situated, and involves increasing participation in communities of practice, alongside experienced community members who already possess the necessary resources. The social structure of communities and the power relations obtaining within them define the learning possibilities available to members. One obvious application of socially situated learning through participation in the activities of a community of practice is to view the classroom as one community of practice, as Toohey (2001, Disputes in Child L2 Learning, TESOL Quarterly 35(2)) has done in an ethnographic study of a group of six young ESL learners. Over a three-year period, the study tracked the children's developing identities and patterns of participation as they progressed from kindergarten through to second grade of elementary school. Toohey shows that some children were more successful than others in establishing themselves as legitimate peripheral participants in the classroom community, and that this affected the extent to which they gained conversational and other language learning opportunities, including access to resources. In a review of their separate studies, Norton and Toohey (2001) comment about the performance of a Polish child, Julie, learning English at primary school and a Polish woman learning English in her work place, a restaurant. With regard to social resources, both Eva and Julie had community or extra community allies to position themselves more favorably within their peer networks. On management outings, Evas partner not only provided rides for her coworkers but helped position Eva as someone in a desirable relationship. Julie developed both adult and child allies at school, most noteworthy of which was her cousin Agatha, an experienced speaker of English and Polish. Such relationships served to place Eva and Julie in more powerful positions with respect to their peers, enhancing their opportunities to participate in the conversations around them. Had Evas boyfriend or Julies allies not been seen as desirable, Eva and Julie might not have been able to negotiate more desirable places for themselves and more opportunities for verbal and social interaction. Past approaches to explaining good language learners might assume that Eva and Julie had gradually developed appropriate strategies for interaction in their respective linguistic communities by, for example, monitoring their performance more diligently and exploiting the target language more systematically. Our research paints a far more complex picture, however. Rather than

focusing on language structures per se, both learners sought to set up counter discourses in which their identities could be respected and their resources valued, thereby enhancing the possibilities for shared conversation. Eva, initially constructed as an ESL immigrant, sought to reposition herself as a multilingual resource with a desirable partner; Julie, initially constructed as an ESL learner, came to be seen as a nice little girl with allies. Their success in claiming more powerful identities seems important to their success as good language learners. This is not to say that proficiency in English was irrelevant in the process of accessing peer networks, particularly in Evas case, but rather that struggles over identity were central. (Norton & Toohey 2001, pp. 31718) This view shifts attention away from questions about, for example, the personality traits or learning styles of participants to questions about how community organization provides positions for participants engagement in community practices. From this perspective, L2 learning is not seen so much as a gradual and neutral process of internalizing the rules, structures, and vocabulary of a standard language; rather, learners are seen to appropriate the utterances of others in particular historical and cultural practices, situated in particular communities. Thus, researchers need to pay close attention to how communities and their practices are structured in order to examine how this structuring facilitates or constrains learners access to the linguistic resources of their communities. (Norton & Toohey 2001, p. 312) Power Relations and Opportunities for SLA Loseys (1995, TESOL Quarterly 29(4)) study involves a mix of monolingual (English as first language) Anglo Americans and bilingual (Spanish as first language) Mexican Americans in an adult literacy classroom. A first analysis showed that in teacher-led, English-medium whole-class discussions, the Anglo students dominated overwhelmingly. Closer study also showed a striking gender difference within the Mexican American group; the few Mexican American males participated at a similar rate to the Anglo students, while Mexican American women scarcely contributed at all to whole-class discussions, though they comprised almost half the class. In small group settings, however, whether with peers or with a tutor, these women talked freely, asking many work-related questions, and jointly solving problems. Losey (1995, p. 655) attributes the womens silence in class and hence, their restricted learning opportunity to their powerless position as a double minority, in terms of both ethnicity and gender.

SLA and Identity

Definitions of Identity Social identity is defined as follows: That part of an individual's self-concept which derives from his knowledge of his membership of a social group (or groups) together with the emotional significance attached to that membership. (Tajfel, 1974, p. 69, cited in Mitchell & Myles, 2004, p. 246) Norton developed a more dynamic view of identity: I use the term identity to reference how a person understands his or her relationship to the world, how that relationship is constructed across time and space, and how the person understands possibilities for the future. (Norton, 2000, p. 5, cited in Mitchell & Myles, 2004, p. 247) Adult Transformations of Identity Norton's longitudinal study explored changes in the participants' social identity over time, and in particular, their struggles to achieve the right to speak in second language settings. Thus, the young worker Eva transformed her self-concept over time from that of unskilled immigrant with no right to speak, to that of multicultural citizen possessing the power to impose reception. Another participant in Norton's study was Martina, a Czech-speaking immigrant in her 30s and a mother, who relied at first on her own children's support in undertaking a range of both public and domestic English-medium negotiations. But Martina viewed herself as the primary caregiver in the family, and

struggled to resume these responsibilities herself (e.g. challenging the landlord by phone, in a disagreement over rental payments). Similarly, in the fast food restaurant where she worked, she was bossed around initially by her teenage fellow workers; but soon she reasserted her status as an adult with authority over children, and claimed the right to speak in this role. So it is observed that as Martina's identity changed, from submissive immigrant to caregiver, so did her opportunities to speak and to learn English. During negotiations of meaning, learners face and self-esteem may be threatened or consolidated. Threats to second language speakers' self-esteem can arise, when misunderstandings are too frequent in interactional data. For example, a Spanish first language speaker, Berta, living in a French-speaking environment, attempted to get some shelves made to order in a woodworking shop. She failed to cope with the shop assistants more technical enquiries, and eventually lost his attention to another customer. In face-threatening situations, second language speakers may use a range of strategies. At one extreme, there may be resistance, that is, more or less complete withdrawal from second language interaction, and a re-assertion of the speakers first language identity (e.g. by switching to monolingual first language use); the minority speakers resorting to this strategy were most usually women (in Bremer et al. 1996). At the other extreme, learners may work hard during L2 interactions to assert a positive, nativespeakerlike identity, by, for example, indicating explicitly that they had understood, or using excuse formulae when they had to interrupt to clarify meaning. These speakers were mostly men. (Mitchell & Myles, 2004, p. 248) Adolescents and L2 Identities Lam (2000, L2 literacy and the design of the self, TESOL Quarterly, 34/3) conducted a case study of a single adolescent ESL learner, Almon, whose English literacy was poor even after five years of schooling in the USA. However, Almon became interested in computer-mediated communication and developed a new identity through chat-room friendships with teenage peers. His development of this alternative identity, and his engagement with a global community of practice through computer-mediated communication, produced a qualitatively different relationship to English: even if its still not very good, I can express myself much more easily now. before I was the type who hated English, really, I didn't like English. But I think it's easier for me to write out something now to express better. (Lam, 2000, p. 468)

Evaluation of Sociolinguistic Enquiry

Sociolinguistic Perspectives on Language Learning and Development L2 ethnographers believe that learning is a collaborative affair, and that language knowledge is socially constructed through interaction. While there has been little investigation on the relation between L2 socialization and the actual route of L2 development, current ethnographies of L2 communication and L2 socialization offer a great deal of evidence about how the learning context, and the learner's engagement with it, may affect the rate of SLL. The patterning of learning opportunities, through communities of practice with structured and sometimes very unequal power relationships, has been invoked to explain learners differential success even where motivation is high. (Mitchell & Myles, 2004, p. 255)