Additional Language Learning in a Classroom Community of Practice

Why This Book Now?

Many potential readers picking up this volume will surely know the rich body of scholarship in the area of classroom discourse, (Cazden, 1988; Cole & Zuengler, 2007; Erickson, 1996; Green & Wallat, 1981; Hester & Francis, 2000; Mehan, 1979; Newman et al., 1989; Nystrand, 1997; Sinclair & Coulthard, 1975; Wells, 1999; among others) and may wonder why they might read yet another study of classroom discourse. Many of those same potential readers will also know that the bulk of the research on classrooms has focused on interaction between the classroom teacher and students. This research has made invaluable contributions to understanding the discourse structures of teacher-led classroom interaction and the relationships between language, teaching and learning. However, because of its focus on the teacher-student cohort interactions (but see Fisher, 1993, 1994; Markee, 2000; Ohta, 2001a, 2001b; among others), this research has not been able to show the turn-by-turn detail of students' interactions with one another and with the subject matter content nor how these interactions lead to learning over time. The lack of focus on learner-learner interaction and development over time has been, for the most part, because of technological limitations.

The vision behind the National Labsite for Adult ESOL (Reder et al., 2003) led technical innovations that allowed for the collection of almost four thousand hours of video recordings of adult ESOL classroom interaction. While some (including the researchers leading the projects) questioned the efficacy of such a massive data collection project (four consecutive years), the rewards are becoming evident as the research findings become public (Brillanceau, 2005; Harris, 2005; Hellermann, 2005b, 2007; Reder, 2005).

The philosophy behind the massive data collection is part of the foundation for the perspective on research and classroom language learning that is taken in this book. Extensive data collection enables a broad and deep empirical vision of a process (learning in a classroom) that occurs through the social interaction of a number of individuals who come together as a collective, mutually goal-oriented enterprise: the Classroom Community of Practice. It is as part of this physical co-presence and the trajectory toward common goals that learning takes place in a classroom. Extensive, long-term data collection through video recordings has allowed researchers to gain insight into both the micro-processes of language development and longer term changes to understand language learning as it happens as part of a community of practice in the classroom.

The availability of a 'full picture' of the breadth and depth of interaction in the classroom has enabled researchers and practitioners to develop a new 'professional vision' (Goodwin, 1994) on the nature of classroom teaching and learning. We have found that practitioners and researchers who see the learning process as it occurs in the classroom, in detail and over time, tend to focus less on what the teacher is doing, less on teaching and learning as a transmission process (Heap, 1985). This richer vision has allowed us to reconsider learning in the classroom as co-constructing knowledge through interaction, 'to be discovered together by the group of human resources in the classroom [and] reflexively constitutive of what indeed is found' (Macbeth, 2003: 258). These opportunities for seeing classrooms anew have enabled empirical studies of the social and situated part of cognition in language learning that has begun in other social scientific disciplines (Cole, 1996; Goodwin, 1995; Hutchins, 1995; Lave & Wenger, 1991; Resnick et al., 1991).

The research reported on in this book takes advantage of new developments in data collection in classrooms (Reder et al., 2003; and described later in this chapter). With this book, I was interested in investigating the ways that particular social actions in adult language learning classrooms, actions that have not been accessible to researchers in the past, are sites for the micro-level practices of language learning and interaction in classroom communities of practice (Lave, 1988, 1996; Lave & Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998; Wortham, 2001). These actions are hybrid areas of talk-in-interaction in which practices for organizing face-to-face interaction through language also organize what we think of as the institutional talk of language-learning tasks.

More specifically, using methods for close analysis of language in interaction from Conversation Analysis (CA), the analytic chapters (3, 4 and 5) will focus on the social practices that adult learners of English use to organize their interactions during dyadic language-learning tasks. The chapters each focus on one area of the task interactions: Chapter 3 on the starts of the tasks, Chapter 4 on non-elicited story tellings that occur during the tasks and Chapter 5 on the talk used to organize the students disengagements from their tasks. The rich perspective on interaction in the classroom afforded by the video technology of the data collection (six cameras) allows for the analysis of micro-level language practices as they occur within a classroom community of practice. With the focus of two of these cameras on two pairs of learners engaged in dyadic interaction in each classroom collected over four years, I will address language learning from both microgenetic (Korobov & Bamberg, 2004; Siegler & Crowley, 1991) and longitudinal perspectives.

Traditional Research on Additional Language Learning

The phrase 'additional language learning' is used deliberately to contrast this study of the social practices involved in language development of the adult immigrant learners with a long history of research in the field known as second language acquisition (SLA). The research program of SLA has focused on the acquisition of an abstract grammatical system in learners' second or other language and the linguistic, social, and cognitive factors that influence that acquisition. The field developed in the later half of the 20th century as researchers became interested in using knowledge from linguistics to improve language instruction (Lado, 1957) and was greatly influenced by cognitive psychology and structural linguistics from its inception in the 1950s. These influences include Chomskian formal linguistics (Flynn & O'Neill, 1988; Gass & Schachter, 1989; White, 1985, 1989; and others) and Labovian sociolinguistics on variation within SLA (Bayley & Preston, 1996; Preston, 1996; Tarone, 1988; Young, 1991). The major impact of structural linguistics and cognitive psychology on studies of second language learning can be seen in the catalog of SLA research through current studies (see compendia by Doughty & Long, 2003; Ritchie...