Teaching and Researching Language and Culture K.J. Hall (2002)

—Teaching and Researching Language and CultureK.J. Hall (2002)
—Sbusiso Ngomane
—ENG 625: Dr. L. Seloni
—Language and Identity

—… In each of these pictures, what is that one thing that comes to your mind, in terms of citizenship and English level of competence, when you look at them?
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—Social Identity

—Every individual has a social background and we see this when we use language.
—Our membership to different social groups accounts to these social backgrounds, i.e. Jews, Muslims, South Africans or Italians.
—The values, beliefs and attitudes associated with our group memberships are significant to the development of our social identities. (Gee, 1996; Ochs, 1993; Tajfel and Turner, 1986)
—Social Identity: Habitus
—The skills, knowledge, attitudes and beliefs comprising our various social identities - predisposing us to act, think and feel in particular ways and to perceive the involvement of others in a certain way.
—E.g. When a native speaker, “automatically”, speaks slow when speaking to a L2 speaker.
—We use this to make sense of each other’s involvement during communication.
—Social Identity: Contextual relevancy
—Our backgrounds, i.e. South African, Christian, Black, etc, show that we have multiple backgrounds but not all of them are relevant (depending on the situation).
—During communications, we consider our goals and the identities of the other participants before assuming a certain identity. E.g. International tourists v/s Local tourists
—Thus, we use our linguistic resources to meet our needs.
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Agency, Identity and Language Use

—We make up societies and societies make up our identities, therefore, we play a huge role in shaping our identities.
—Language use makes the construction of identity an incomplete process.
—While social identities influence our linguistic actions, they do not determine them!!!
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Agency, Identity and Language Use:Giddens’ Theory of Structuration

—Theory of Structuration – individual agency is a semiotic activity, a social construction, ‘something that has to be routinely created and sustained in the reflexive activities of the individual’ (Anthony Giddens, 1984 and 1991).
—Patterns develop from social structures repeated in recurring social practices.
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Agency, Identity and Language Use:Bourdieu’s Notion of Habitus

—Habitus is accountable for our actions.
—It gives experience meaning.
—It seeks to create the conditions most favourable to what it is. (e.g. reaching a consensus).
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Research on Language Use and Identity
—Interactional Sociolinguistics (IS)

—Steered by the notion of Contextualization cues (Ref.: pp 38-39 for definition).
—These cues encompass various forms of speech production i.e. lexical, syntactic, pragmatic and paralinguistic.
—Co-construction of Identity (CI)

—Ref.: p 43 for definition
—Concerned about the different resources that mark individuals as different in different contexts.
— This includes eye contact, body posture and personal space. E.g.: Algerians v/s Americans
—Turn-taking patterns and the language code which result in mutual adjustment to reach the “communication goal”.
—Kandiah (1991) held a different view, pointing out that the cues could not account fully for any miscommunication.
—Macro patterns of identity development, such as self-perception and beliefs, should be recognized during identity development research.
—Identities are not just reproduced but are transformed!!!
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Language-and-Culture Learning

—A sociocultural perspective
—Language socialization
—Learning how to mean
—Social activity and Language development
—Social activity and cognitive development
—Language classrooms as fundamental sites of learning
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A Sociocultural Perspective

—We learn to recognize what is happening and predict what shall happen next by spending more time with experienced members of the society.
—We develop an understanding of the sociocultural importance of the activity, its values and goals, and the roles we, and the other participants, are appropriated into playing.
—The process of appropriation takes place in the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD). – Vygotsky,1978.
—ZPD is ‘the distance between the actual development level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers’ (ibid.:86).
—ZPD – scaffolding, modeling and training.

—A Sociocultural Perspective: Mediational means

—The resources used by expert members to assist less competent participants in noticing, ordering, representing and remembering their involvement in their communicative activities.
—They can be verbal, visual or physical, i.e. a calendar or a map.
—They give form and meaning to the actions we take to enhance, and give form to, individual development.

—Language Socialization

—Language is used to socialize children into meaningful, appropriate and effective uses of language and at the same time into culturally specific ways of thinking and knowing (Ochs and Schieffelin,1982).
—Indexicality – the process by which situational meanings (e.g. social id., resource, et cetera) are assigned to forms (e.g. intonation patterns, speech acts, turn-taking patterns).
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Learning How to Mean

—The interpretation of a child’s utterances, by adults, in a way that made sense to them in the interaction with the child, influences what the child eventually learns (Halliday, 1975).
—Children learn language by ‘learning how to behave in situations, not by learning rules about what to say’ ( Halliday et al., 1964: 179).
—Language learning and the act of learning culture are mutually constitutive.
—Language allows us to coordinate activities with others and learn the knowledge, practices, beliefs and values of their culture.
—In learning a language a child’s duty is construct the systems of meanings that represents his own model of social reality.

—Social Activity and Language Development

—Recurring communicative activities (or repeated experience) helps the child to acquire both the forms and meanings.
—They actively select and attend to specific kinds of information, hypothesize about the meaning of their and others’ actions.
—Context-orientated communication is shown in Tomasello et al. (1990) of caregiver-child talk: mother-child v/s father-child interaction
—The authors pointed out that this responses by the child to each parent’s non-acknowledgements arose from the interaction experiences they have with both parents.
—Contextual conditions in the process (of Language learning) include frequency of appearance in the linguistic environment, clarity of their form-function relationship, learner’s interest and understanding the purpose.
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Social Activity and Cognitive Development

—Studies show that young children’s description of spatial arrangements are more similar to descriptions by adult speakers of their particular language group than they are to descriptions by children of the same age group but in different language groups.
—Language-specific development gives shape to cognitive organization and perception by filtering ‘incoming information, leading children to pay more or less attention to different aspects of reality, … (Hickmann, 2001: 113)
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Language Classrooms as Fundamental Sites of Learning

—Learner participation, with more experienced participants i.e. their teachers, in the classroom develops habits of participation.
—Resulting in the socialization of learners to understand their roles and relationships considered as important tot heir lives as learners.
—Not only does learning take place, but learners are shaped for a broader picture, like partaking in future educational events and the roles and membership they hold as participants.
—Individual language behavior can only be understood through examining its sociocultural origins and evolution.
—Thus saying, the communicative activities of the classroom and their resources, the particular participants and their histories, and the very process by which participants conjointly use the resources to accomplish their lives as members of their classrooms or other learning contexts, become the fundamental units of analysis.
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Conclusion

—While classroom are indeed important sites of learning, they are not the only places where language learning occurs.
—Teach with your heart, for the identities of your learners are at your mercy!

Things to think about…

1. The “more traditional ‘linguistics applied’ approach” (Hall, 2002), suggests that cultural norms exist in isolation and we are said to “play no role in defining cultural norms” (page 32), all we do is reflect them. Having not read this article, would you agree or disagree with this statement and why?
2. What are the social identity differences that we have in this class and which one(s) will be relevant in this “situation”?
3. Would a change in setting (e.g. going to another country, state or town for more than a week, so to say.) change the “shape” of our identity?
4. Do actions, incl. linguistic actions, exist in isolation of any social context? (Do we really have objective research?)
5. To what extent do you agree or disagree with the statement, “Any misuse or misinterpretation of cues is assumed to be due to the lack of shared knowledge of specific cue meanings.” (p39)?