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;...