Political and Philosophical Roots of TESOL

The first part of this chapter that caught my attention was when Wong posed the question, “What purpose does education serve?”. She went on to question whether education should seek to replicate hierarchical social structures or to change them. We often do not consider how our classrooms can serve to reinforce oppressive social structures. We are appalled to hear that at one point in our nation’s history, it was considered appropriate to separate Native American children from their families and place them in boarding schools in an attempt to strip them of their culture. However, we do not consider how our classrooms today can still serve to reinforce the same oppressive standards that account for the fact that power is still concentrated in the hands of a small white, male, elite. Granting everyone access to knowledge and education is the key to realizing true democracy, where everyone has a voice and is heard.

I found the social focus of dialogic approaches very fascinating. I agree that learning a language is a social process. I believe that to learn a language a student must be able to interact with other speakers and actively construct their knowledge through these interactions. My most memorable and effective experiences learning languages have always consisted of utilizing the language in a social context and exploring what I knew, what I thought I might know, and what I thought I did not know. I also agree that to fully understand this process and maximize every student’s potential, we must take into consideration how power structures and politics enter our classrooms and counter any negative affects so as to allow all of our students a voice. I was once observing a Spanish class where when a student asked if a certain grammatical structure was correct, the teacher responded that while it is a structure that is found in conversation, saying it would come across as unintelligent. I immediately wondered what the effect of that statement would be for the students in the class for whom Spanish was an L1 as well as those for whom it was an L2. Would the student’s whose family spoke Spanish feel ashamed or alienated if they felt the teacher had devalued their family’s dialect? Would the students learning Spanish as an L2 be afraid to take risks in their L2 for fear of sounding unintelligent? Or would they come to judge other speakers for utilizing “incorrect” grammar? Certain beliefs about language that are commonly taught, formally or informally, in the classroom are created and taught from a position of privilege and reflect inaccurate, or even prejudiced views of a language and its speakers.

Overall, I felt this chapter was extremely interesting and important. I feel as though this chapter has put a name to many practices I have experienced in my own life as a student and L2 learner. I have experienced both these approaches to language teaching, as well as observed how our classrooms can be used to either reinforce or minimize the effects of politics and power structures.

Good Language Learners and Social Identity in SLA

It is difficult to define exactly what a "good language learner" is. Researchers in SLA have been attempting to explain why some learners are more successful than others despite the fact that everyone is able to successfully acquire their L1 and achieve fluency. This is because while any type of language acquisition is a complex process, SLA is influenced by other factors such as age and "motivation", as well as sociocultural influences. However, as Bonnie Norton Pierce and Kelleen Toohey explain, factors beyond "motivation" play a role in SLA; specifically, sociocultural factors and the types of opportunities a learner's community/society offers her/him.

A study called The Good Language Learner, conducted in the mid 1970's,  determined that, "adult good language learners appeared to use five significant strategies: (a) taking an active approach to the task of language learning, (b) recognizing and exploiting the systematic nature of language, (c) using the language they were learning for communication and interaction, (d) managing their own affective difficulties with language learning, and (e) monitoring their language learning performance.

While these results focus on the input and output of L2, more recent studies have focused on the additional influence of sociocultural factors on language learners; basically, that L2 learners exist within specific historical, social, and cultural contexts which influence how a learner learns an L2 and how successful they are. Learners must have access to various conversations in their communities for learning to take place. As Vygotsky explained, learning is a social process, and while it is possible for some language learners to be successful without large amounts of social interaction in their L2, it is much less likely for a learner to be successful if they do not have the opportunity to speak and access various types of conversation with other speakers.

This can be difficult because not all communities or practices are structured in ways that allow L2 learners to access these opportunities with ease. As Pierce and Toohey saw with the participants in their study, certain social situations are more "inviting" to L2 learners, while others are not. For example, Eva worked at a fast food restaurant called Munchies where her limited English and immigrant status landed her a job cleaning the store which allowed her very little access to the conversations and interactions that would have allowed her to explore her L2 capabilities. However, while she did not have this opportunity at work, she took advantage of monthly employee outings to speak to her co-workers in a different environment, enabling them to see her in a different light than they once had and enhancing her ability to engage them in conversation in the work place.

Through Eva, we see that her success was a combination of structures already in place, but also her own attempts to take advantage of opportunities when they arose. This is because of the effect "social identity" has on language learning. As Pierce and Toohey explain, social identity is not a unidimensional aspect of an individual; it is dynamic and multifaceted. Eva's social identity evolved over the course of her time in the United States and learning English. She began to view herself as a "multicultural citizen with power" rather than an "illegitimate speaker of English".

The issue of power that enabled Eva to take more control in her own L2 interactions is an important issue that can play a large role in a learner's ability to learn an L2. Power dynamics play a large role in social interactions, though we often do not notice it. Unfortunately, those who are listening do not always regard those who are speaking as "worthy to speak". All too often, L2 learners are dismissed, whether verbally or nonverbally, directly or indirectly, because of their L2 status, immigrant status, or other perceived statuses. This can make it difficult for an L2 learner to insert themselves into conversations where they may not be welcome or respected. Therefore, although a learner may be highly "motivated" or "invested" in learning an L2, they may not always have the opportunity to explore this because of power imbalances in their communities or society.

Social Contexts of Second Language Acquisition

An important aspect of learning a language involves the concept of communicative competence, which is defined as "what a speaker needs to know to communicate appropriately within a particular language community". Basically, simply comprehending and accurately producing vocabulary and grammatical structures is not the only important aspect of second language acquisition; it is also necessary to understand how to use language appropriately, including when to speak and when not to, and how to speak to who. How competent a person becomes at a language varies from person to person and is influenced by many factors on a microsocial and macrosocial level.

On a microsocial level, the communicative context in which the speaker learns to produce language. The communicative context includes:
Linguistic Contexts: elements of form and function associated with the variable element.

Psychological Contexts: factors associated with the amount of attention which is being given to language form during production, the level of automaticity versus control in processing, or the intellectual demands of a particular task.

Microsocial Contexts: features of setting/situation and interaction which relate to communicative events within which language is being produced, interpreted, and negotiated, including level of formality and participants' relationship to one another, and whether the interaction is public or intimate.

Research on microsocial contexts is based on Accommodation Theory which asserts that speakers change their language production to sound more like whomever they're speaking to.

Macrosocial factors that influence language learning include: Social Categories, Circumstances of Learning, and

Global and national status of L1 and L2: Languages serve to facilitate political identification and cohesion and as well as play roles in times of empire-building. A language's status can influence not only people's willingness to use a language, but also the amount of resources available to help them learn an language.

Boundaries and identities: A language can serve to reinforce identities and boundaries between groups of people, but can also be used as a tool to to participate in another group by learning their language.

Institutional forces and constraints: Power, authority and influence are related to SLA as far as language-related social control, access to knowledge, and linguistic privilege.

Psychology of Second Language Acquisition/Wild Child

Chapter 4 in Saville-Troike covered the psychological perspectives on what is acquired in SLA. It discussed concepts, such as the specialization of each hemisphere of the brain, known as lateralization. While both hemispheres play a role in the acquisition and production of language, each hemisphere has a unique role. The left hemisphere contains Broca's area which seems to be responsible for the ability to speak and Wernick's area which seems to be central to language processing. An interesting fact about brain is that if one hemisphere is injured, the other hemisphere could potentially take over the tasks of the injured hemisphere, restoring/partially restoring abilities that would have been lost. Lateralization increases as the brain matures, which means that over time each hemisphere becomes less able to assume the functions of the other. The principal hemispheric specializations are:

Left: phonology, morphology, syntax, function words and inflections, tone systems, and much lexical knowledge

Right: Nonverbal, Visuospatial information, intonation, nonliteral meaning and ambiguity, many pragmatic abilities, and some lexical knowledge.


The two major frameworks for studying learning processes are Information Processing and Connectionism. IP is concerned with the mental processes involved in language learning and use, including perception and the input of new information, the formation, organization and regulation of internal representations, and retrieval and output strategies. Connectionism focuses on the increasing strength of associations between stimuli and responses.

Saville-Troike, as well as Lightbrown/Spada went on to explain the differences in learners when it comes to SLA. Differences in SLA among different learners can be explained by several factors: age, sex, aptitude, motivation, cognitive style, personality, and learning strategies, identity and ethnic group affiliations and learner beliefs. All of these factors combine to influence how successfully a learner acquires and L2.

The Wild Child
I was already familiar with Victor's story through a Intro to Special Ed. class I took, which looked at Victor not only in terms of his language acquisition, but also examined the speculation that Victor may have had a form of autism. While we have no way of knowing whether the latter is true, it is certain that Victor's isolated life contributed to his abnormal language development. Victor's case does seem to support Critical Period Hypothesis because his lack of exposure to language seemed to severely inhibit his ability to acquire it later, though the movie seemed to focus on a rather short period of time. Do we know how his abilities progressed in the future?