1. SOCIAL DIMENSIONS OF L2 LEARNING (Ch. 10)
Understanding SLA
Lourdes Ortega (2009)
Published by Routledge © 2009 Mark Sawyer

2. THE UNBEARABLE INELUCTABILITY OF THE SOCIAL CONTEXT (10.1)
“SLA as chameleon” metaphor:
Social forces are central to understand living agents
Social constructivism (cf. psych. constructivism)
Reality doesn’t exist, but is created by agents, groups
Socioculturalism (Activity Theory??)
Reality emerges anew in each contextualized activity
Poststructuralism (overlaps postmodernism)
Reality emerges thru discourse (language, practices)

3. COGNITION IS SOCIAL: VYGOTSKIAN SOCIOCULTURAL THEORY IN SLA (10.2)
Lev Vygotsky ( )
Higher mental operations have social origins
SocioCultural Theory (SCT) in SLA
Introduced, developed by James Lantolf
Popularized by Merrill Swain’s rethinking of SLA cornerstones (output, interaction)
Consciousness requires symbolic tools

4. SELF-REGULATION & LANGUAGE MEDIATION (10.3)
Human actions are regulated (enabled/disabled) by 3 sources:
Objects: tools (+), obstructions (–)
Others: (e.g. mothers) physical, linguistic (social speech), nonverbal symbolic
Self: thru private, inner speech
L2 self-regulation shows L2 development

5. More private speech at lower levels (L&F)
SOME FINDINGS ABOUT INNER, PRIVATE, & SOCIAL SPEECH IN L2 LEARNING (10.4)
Learner regained affective control thru private speech after disappointing task (de Guerrero)
More private speech at lower levels (L&F)
Tense/aspect choices reveal regulation
In languaging, verbalization causes learning
e.g. pun meanings (Tocalli-Beller & Swain)
verb morphology (Donato)

6. SOCIAL LEARNING IN THE ZONE OF PROXIMAL DEVELOPMENT (10.5)
All (higher) cognition appears interpersonally before intrapersonally
Microgenetic method
Observing (visible) development in real time
Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD)
distance between assisted & unassisted ability

7. NEGATIVE FEEDBACK RECONCEPTUALIZED (10.6)
Graduated & contingent feedback ensures helpfulness within ZPD
Graduation: 12 levels from implicit “find errors” to explicit examples of pattern (Lantolf & Aljaafreh)
ZPD-sensitive tutorials were better than ZPD-insensitive ones (Nassaji & Swain)

8. INTERACTION IS SOCIAL: CONVERSATION ANALYSIS & SLA (10.7)
Sociologist Harold Garfinkel studied interaction-based social organization, labeled ethnomethodology
Developed by his UCLA followers
Harvey Sacks, Emanuel Schegloff, Gail Jefferson
Applied to L2 by Numa Markee, Johannes Wagner, Alan Firth, Paul Seedhouse, Gabi Kasper, Junko Mori

9. THE CA PERSPECTIVE IN A NUTSHELL (10.8)
Context-free (universal) machinery for organizing talk/social life:
turn-taking, repair, sequential design
Radically emic perspective: participant orientations, relevancies, intersubjectivities must be observed (Markee & Kasper)
No a priori categories, but a posteriori OK with witnessable evidence in transcriptions

10. SOME CONTRIBUTIONS OF CA-FOR-SLA (10.9)
JPN EFL: CV-izing (e.g. raining-u) not seen as error but interactional resource, showing incompleteness (Don Carroll)
JPN JSL: (only) at times, L2ers orient as “novices”, L1ers respond as “experts”
(Yuri Hosoda)
Finland FSL: Such co-orientation does not always occur, due to roles? (Kurhila)

11. LEARNING IN CA-FOR-SLA (10.10)
W/O concept of learning, hard to show it
Strategy: show longitudinal changes
L1 JPN Danish L2er (Brouwer & Wagner)
Vietnamese ESLer (Young & Miller, 2004)
2 ESLers from MEX, CHN (Hellerman, 2006)
CA may answer WHEN?, but not WHAT? or HOW?; needs help

12. GRAMMAR IS SOCIAL: SYSTEMIC FUNCTIONAL LINGUISTICS (10.11)
Developed by M.A.K. Halliday
Dominant in Australia
Analyses form based on meaning-making within social contexts
Focuses above sentence-level

13. LEARNING HOW TO MEAN IN AN L2 (10.12)
L2 academic writing development:
lexical density , grammatical metaphor , grammatical intricacy  (Achugar & Colombi)
Functional recasts
T co-constructs academic oral expression with L2er (Mohan & Slater, 2006)
Academic identity development thru resources of appraisal systems (A&C)

14. Extended by Shirley Brice-Heath to US school/home literacy practices
LANGUAGE LEARNING IS SOCIAL LEARNING: LANGUAGE SOCIALIZATION THEORY (10.13)
Socialization: Language, other cultural practices, values learned seamlessly thru interactions (e.g. with caregivers)
Extended by Shirley Brice-Heath to US school/home literacy practices
2nd generation focuses on multilingual & multicultural contexts

15. THE PROCESS OF LANGUAGE SOCIALIZATION: ACCESS & PARTICIPATION (10.14)
Community access & participation often involves struggles for L2ers
CAN HS L2ers silent because unfamiliar with popular culture references (Duff)
USA ES L2er needed chances to be cultural expert (Rymes)
CAN GS L2ers socialized differently due to approaches of instructors (Morita)

16. THE OUTCOMES: WHAT IS LEARNED THRU L2 SOCIALIZATION? (10.15)
Beyond L2, C2 identities, stances, ideologies, practices, values are learned
SA students in Indonesia: new stance to food (Dufon)
Fulbe children in Cameroon: different purposes of memorization in Arabic and French learning contexts (Moore)
Danger of assimilationist ideology

17. SENSE OF SELF IS SOCIAL: IDENTITY THEORY (10.16)
Started with Bonny Norton’s (BN) study of 5 immigrant women in Canada
Identities are socially constructed & constrained, dynamic, contradictory
Investment: BN’s version of motivation
Communities of Practice (real, imagined) are targets for investment
Right to Speak is unequally distributed

18. L2 LEARNERS’ IDENTITY & POWER STRUGGLE: EXAMPLES FROM CIRCUMSTANTIAL L2 LEARNING (10.17)
CHN in US HS unfairly positioned as low achiever, dropped out (McKay & Wong)
Oldcomers in US positioned favorably in HS, but not in CC ESL (Harklau)
Polish Katarina in CAN invested in computer rather than ESL to pursue well-educated self/community (BN)

19. CLOSE IMPACT OF IDENTITIES ON L2 LEARNING: EXAMPLES FROM ELECTIVE LEARNING (10.18)
Many L2ers embrace idealized NS target, but some selectively resist (Yumiko Ohara)
Community may resist L2er efforts to identify (Meryl Siegal)
Investments, desires, identity negotiations are affected by socially constructed categories of gender, race, & class: Spain (Livia Polanyi), France (Celeste Kinginger)

20. TECHNOLOGY-MEDIATED COMMUNICATION AS A SITE FOR SOCIALLY RICH L2 LEARNING (10.19)
Technology as medium enables intercultural communication, multimedia publication, distance learning, community participation, identity formation
HS SFL Chat: Wider variety of functions than face-to-face discourse (Darhower)
Community acceptance, engagement (Lam)
Remarkable literacy engagement (Black, Yi)

21. NEVER JUST ABOUT ABOUT LANGUAGE (10.20)
Many/most/all (?) L2ers try to transform their worlds, seeking material, symbolic, affective, self-affirming returns
L2 social contexts are sites of struggle
Proficiency ≠ success
How can/should L2 teachers promote empowerment, social transformation?