Learning Language as a Matter of Learning Social Languages within Discourses

JAMES PAUL GEE

Introduction

In this chapter, I argue for a sociocultural perspective on what is involved in literacy and language learning at any level, whether for children or adults. This perspective makes two key claims. First: people do not primarily learn language at the level of things like 'English' or 'Russian'. Rather, they learn one or another of a great many different varieties of English that I will call 'social languages' (Gee, 1996, 1999a). Each social language offers speakers or writers distinctive grammatical resources with which they can 'design' their oral or written 'utterances' to accomplish two inter-related things:

(1) to get recognized by others (and themselves) as enacting a specific socially-situated identity (that is, to 'come off' as a particular 'kind of person') and

(2) to get recognized by others (and themselves) as engaged in a specific socially-situated activity.

Thus, each distinctive social language allows a speaker or writer to be recognized as a socially-situated 'who doing what' (Wieder & Pratt, 1990).

The second claim is that, in anything like the traditional ways in which philosophers, linguists, and psychologists have talked about meaning for things like words, phrases, and sentences (e.g. in terms of definitions, concepts, stored representations), at the level of social languages, there is no such thing as meaning. In social languages, meaning is not something that is 'stored' in the head and then looked up or accessed. It is actually 'customized', built, or assembled (however we want to phrase the matter) here and now, on the fly, on the spot, 'on line' when and as we speak/write or listen/ read (Barsalou, 1999; Clancey, 1997).

Below, I will first lay out the key elements of a sociocultural perspective on language and literacy. I will then show these elements at work in concrete examples. The most extended example involves a Korean graduate student trying to use, not 'English' per se, but a social language that will allow her to enact successfully the identity of an advanced doctoral student accomplishing the very consequential activity of getting a faculty member to take her on as a thesis student.

In the final section of this chapter, I will briefly discuss what is required for teaching and learning language in the sociocultural sense developed here, with particular reference to learners I will refer to as 'authentic beginners'. Let me take a moment here and say what I mean by the term 'authentic beginners'. In other work, I have used the term 'latecomers' for such learners, since they are people who arrive at learning sites after some other learners have already engaged in a good bit of consequential learning practice in terms of which they come to look smart or gifted and the latecomers come to look 'slow'. But, as Pippa Stein (personal communication) has pointed out to me, the term 'latecomer' has the unfortunate (and untrue) implication that it is the latecomers' fault that they have arrived 'late in the game'. So, I will switch to the term 'authentic beginner'.

I will use the term 'authentic beginners' for people, whether children or adults, who have come to learning sites of any sort without the sorts of early preparation, pre-alignment in terms of cultural values, and sociocultural resources that more advantaged learners at those sites have. For example, it has long been argued in the educational literature (e.g. Heath, 1983; Gee, 1996) that schools resonate (in many cases, for historical and arbitrary reasons) with the values and practices of certain types of (usually middle class) homes. Children from these homes are 'false beginners' when they enter school to begin their formal introduction into literacy and school-based learning. They come to look like 'quick studies' when they pick up early school-based literacy so quickly. On the other hand, children from some minority and lower-socioeconomic homes are 'authentic beginners', having come from homes with other sorts of (often equally complex) values and practices with regard to literacy and language, ones that do not resonate with early schooling. They are treated as if they are 'slow' even when they are, in fact, making substantive progress. Worse yet, their induction often skips things that teachers assume they 'should' already know because, in fact, 'false beginners' already take these things for granted.

The Korean doctoral student I will discuss below, like many foreign students in the United States, came to her US graduate school as an 'authentic beginner', as, indeed, do many native English speaking minority and lower-socioeconomic students. She was, of course, well educated, and no beginner in that sense. But she was an authentic beginner in her attempts to master the sociocultural identity (and concomitant practices) of being a graduate student in a US research-based university. When she entered graduate school, she was treated as if she were a co-equal beginning graduate student, while, in fact, many of her fellow students were false beginners who came to graduate school 'pre-aligned' for success, based on their earlier experiences – in this case experiences that may have taken place anywhere between (or throughout the course of) their early home-based socialization and their college careers.

As the Korean student failed to make rapid progress, she was progressively treated as a 'failure' in relation to her fellow students. And, of course, no one ever felt the need to teach her what they assumed any graduate student in a US research university already knew, even when, perhaps, it was obvious she did not know such things. In fact, some of what she needed to know was so taken for granted and unconscious to her fellow graduate students and her professors that they could not in any case have articulated the knowledge she needed.

What I want to concentrate on here is not...